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Over the course of five months, Elliott Greenblott tallied more than 220 COVID-19-related scams targeting Twin State residents.
That number likely only scratches the surface.
“Sometimes people will say there is nothing new under the sun; that’s true with scamming as well,” Greenblott, the Vermont coordinator of the AARP Fraud Watch Network, said prior to a virtual presentation hosted by the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Aging Resource Center last Monday. “A lot of scams that I am seeing have to do with home improvement, and the COVID twist is home air purifiers that will get rid of viruses.”
In a sense, scammers are not reinventing anything: They’re using tried-and-true scams while playing on people’s stress surrounding the pandemic.
The “grandparents” scam, for example — where a scammer calls claiming a…
