- Inform your parents and grandparents!
- For a sustainable dissemination of warnings and behavioral tips, we also need the support of children and grandchildren!
- But don't forget the many single older people in your circle of friends or acquaintances, the neighborhood or your club.
Oberhausen police
Be sure to inform parents and grandparents!
The police make regular appeals and provide information - but senior citizens are still falling victim. Many of the victims do not recover from the shock. The damage is then not only of a material nature, but also results in people losing their faith in themselves and their zest for life.
This is why the Oberhausen police came up with a new concept at the beginning of 2023: A sticker album against telephone scammers. The idea: grandchildren and children collect stickers together with their parents or grandparents,
in the style of the popular collectible picture booklets. But instead of short texts about soccer and the like, senior citizens will find important information about the various types of fraud in the album. The criminals are inventive: they pretend to be police officers, public prosecutors or waterworks workers. They have even gone as far as coronavirus, posing as employees of the public health department and demanding horrendous sums for coronavirus vaccinations. The perpetrators, who are usually based in professionally managed call centers, are eloquent and convincing. They search for older-sounding first names in telephone directories on the internet. They then make phone calls until a victim falls for the scam. To prevent this from happening again, the free sticker album has been developed.
In addition to the informative part with lots of tips and hints, it should of course also be fun. To this end, there are free fields that can be filled in by grandchildren and children. There is also space for entries, for example with the telephone numbers of close relatives, who can be contacted directly in an emergency.
The senior citizens also receive free stickers if they have taken part in three different appointments with the police or cooperation partners. Each participant needs a total of three sachets - there are no duplicate stickers - to fill their album.
The last sticker is the final one and is something special: it can be collected from the police. Once the booklet is finished, it is hoped that it will invite older people to browse through it and the prevention tips it contains will be internalized again and again.
