Seniors in Haines Junction, Yukon, targeted by 'grandparent scam'
CBC
A few weeks ago Catherine Millard, a senior who lives in Haines Junction, Yukon, received the sort of phone call most people would dread: she was told by the unknown caller that her husband had just been in a car accident in Whitehorse.
But Millard knew immediately it was a scam. That's because she had lost her husband just weeks earlier.
"I said, 'excuse me, my husband's deceased. I buried him on December the 10th,'" Millard recalled.
"They go, 'no, no, no.' And I said, 'I'm positive. I buried my husband on the 10th.'"
The caller tried to insist that Millard's husband had been in an accident and had been arrested, and seemed to get irritated when Millard didn't believe it.
"And I said, 'you want me to try and go down to Champagne and try to get him out of his grave?''' Millard recalled.
She says the scammer — who knew her late husband's full name — then hung up on her.
Millard says there were other residents in Haines Junction that received similar calls during the next week.
Josephine Boyle, also a senior, says she was with her husband when he received a suspicious phone call around that time. The caller said Boyle's great nephew Justin had been in an accident in Vancouver, and had hit a child while driving to work.
The caller said that the child ended up in an ambulance and that Justin was in jail. Boyle said the caller was asking for $18,000 to hire a lawyer.
Boyle says the scammer was very convincing, even addressing her and her husband as "auntie" and "uncle."
But Boyle says she listened to her intuition. Some things were not adding up. Boyle questioned why the caller was contacting them instead of Justin's parents, and why her nephew would have been immediately jailed.
"Why would you throw somebody in jail? Wouldn't you take him to an ambulance first and check this fellow out first, before throwing him in jail?" Boyle said.
Still, the call stressed her out.
While his party has made a cause célèbre out of its battle with the Speaker, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has periodically waxed poetic about the House of Commons — suggesting that its green upholstery is meant to symbolize the fields of the English countryside where commoners met centuries ago before the signing of the Magna Carta.