Scammers on the Rise again pretending to be Family Members

The scam was popular about 10 years ago in the form of phone calls, emails and chats through social websites.

 The latest an elderly Swiss couple have been duped out of more than £355,000 by a woman pretending to be their granddaughter – one of the largest such scams on record in the country.

Police in Zurich said the couple, aged in their 70s, received a call in February from a woman posing as their granddaughter, claiming she was in financial difficulty.

Over the course of several weeks, she allegedly convinced the couple to hand over money to a friend of hers.

The couple only realised they had been scammed in mid-March, when they contacted their real granddaughter to ask why they had not heard back from her in a while, only to find out she had never asked them for money.

She said these types of scams – where someone posing as family pretends to be in desperate need of money to trick elderly people out of their savings – have long been a problem in the Swiss financial capital.

Read More... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/switzerland/9952975/Couple-duped-out-of-thousands-by-woman-pretending-to-be-granddaughter.html