Two payment methods in the grandparent scam do not look like fraud at first: a stranger who arrives at the door to collect cash, and an envelope of bills tucked inside a magazine or book and mailed. Both appear in a public service announcement from the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, known as IC3, dated November 17, 2023, and both remain standard warning signs of the scheme years later.
The alert put numbers on the problem for the first nine months of 2023: 195 victim complaints about grandparent scams and at least $1.9 million in losses. The figures are a floor, since they count only what victims reported to the FBI, and they describe a specific period rather than the current year.
A two-caller script built on panic
According to the IC3 announcement, the fraud usually begins with a phone call in which the scammer poses as a grandchild who has been arrested after a vehicle accident. In some versions the crash is said to involve a diplomat or a pregnant woman, details added to raise the stakes.
A second scammer then enters the call as a lawyer or legal representative and demands money for bail, legal fees or medical expenses. Victims are told to keep the matter secret, with the warning that telling anyone will make the grandchild's situation worse. Further demands may follow, citing injuries or a death, so a single call can grow into repeated payments.
The secrecy instruction keeps the story from being checked, because the one person who could disprove it, the real grandchild, is never called.
Cash in magazines and couriers at the door
The FBI listed three ways victims are told to pay: a wire transfer; cash, packaged in magazines or books and sent through the U.S. mail; or handing the money to couriers who may be witting or unwitting, including rideshare drivers. The last detail matters because a driver hired through an app may have no idea the package holds fraud proceeds.
The Federal Trade Commission had flagged the in-person variant earlier. In an April 13, 2021 consumer alert, the agency said scammers had shifted toward arranging cash pickups at victims' homes instead of asking for gift cards or wire transfers. Its advice was to "take a breath and resist the pressure to pay," and it noted that anyone demanding payment by gift card or money transfer is a scammer.
The FTC's current family emergency scams page lists courier delivery of cash alongside wire transfers and gift cards, and says the callers use urgency to keep the target from checking the story. Cash handed to a courier or dropped in a mailbox cannot be recalled the way a card charge sometimes can, so the checking has to happen before the money moves, and the caller's insistence on speed is itself the sign to slow down.
The hang-up-and-call-back fix, and the voice problem
The FBI's central instruction is to hang up and verify the story by calling the family member directly, on a number already known. Its other recommendations are to avoid answering calls from unknown numbers, to limit personal details shared on social media, and never to share financial information with unsolicited contacts. Reports go to the IC3 at ic3.gov, and the FTC separately takes reports at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and lists a phone line, 1-877-FTC-HELP, for people who cannot file online. The FTC also notes that scammers often target older adults, which is why its guidance urges families to talk about these calls before one arrives, since a rehearsed plan is easier to follow than an improvised one in the middle of a frightening phone call.
Voice is a weaker check than it used to be. In a March 20, 2023 alert, FTC consumer education specialist Alvaro Puig described how a scammer could clone a relative's voice from a short audio clip, so that the caller would sound just like the loved one. The FTC's advice is not to rely on voice recognition alone and to call the person directly, or another family member, before sending anything.
The agency's Pass It On material repeats the same core step in plain terms, telling readers to look up the grandchild's number personally or phone another relative. It also notes that scammers pull details from social media and hacked email to appear credible, which is why the FBI's advice about limiting public personal information sits beside the call-back rule.
The IC3 announcement leaves one question that its own numbers cannot answer: how many additional victims never filed a complaint at all. The 195 complaints and $1.9 million in losses cover January through September 2023 only, and the payment methods described in that alert are the ones the FBI asked families to recognize.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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