Senior citizens warned against con-men
DON’T talk to strangers.
This is usually the first advice given to kids who are able to walk and find themselves away from their parents’ reach.
The advice is echoed by Vice Mayor Belen Fernandez, not to day-care kids, but to senior citizens after reports of a number of elderly residents being victimized by con artists reached her office.
She raised the alert during the group’s monthly meeting at the city’s Senior Citizens Center on A. B. Fernandez Avenue West last Wednesday.
Fernandez cited reports of three or four senior citizens who were scammed and whose pensions have been taken by unidentified persons who sweet-talked them into investing in a ‘double- your-money’ scheme.
She said these fraud artists are continuously on the prowl for unsuspecting elderly senior citizens receiving monthly pensions.
The vice mayor said while there are efforts to entrap and arrest the con-men, senior citizens must not talk to strangers and just stay away from the latter “particularly when they persist to approach you”.
She advised senior citizens to notify the police or the Emergency Operations Center about presence of strangers who are doggedly tailing them for offers of investment plans.
The meeting, presided over by former OIC Mayor Felipe Siapno, president of the Dagupan chapter of the Senior Citizens Association of the Philippines, also discussed a plan to mobilize qualified senior citizens to teach value formation in day care centers in the city.
Siapno said retired teachers, school principals and supervisors are being encouraged to volunteer to teach value formation on the kids and re-instill such age-old virtues as paying respect to the elders and honesty.
The vice mayor provided the members bottles of alcohol to help protect them from the contagious A (H1N1) influenza.—LM
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