The students from Varna Free University “Chernorizets Hrabar”, together with the District Directorate of the Ministry of Interior in Varna and the five regional municipalities in the sea capital start an information campaign on a large-scale against telephone con men.
Yesterday, the teams consisting of different students met with inspectors from the security police sector at the Department of the Ministry of Interior, Varna, who told them how these people work.
Next week the young volunteers from VFU “Chernorizets Hrabar” will visit 24 clubs for elderly people on the territory of the five Varna districts and will meet over 3,000 elderly people. Students will present an algorithm - how to deal with malicious calls.
Some of the recommendations of the police in such cases say that the elderly should immediately contact a close person they trust - children, relatives, neighbours, friends, call 112 or the police. It will be good if the younger relatives remind their elderly ones about the potential danger, to talk with their grandparents about the important details, which can then save them from fraud.
Here are some of the recommendations of inspectors from the Security Police sector, which students will pass on to the elderly:
- Do not tell strangers anything about yourselves.
- Interrupt the phone call immediately.
- Do not give personal details about yourselves and your family - names, address and phone number.
- Make sure you have disconnected the telephone before calling 112 or the police or call from another device.
Very often, the call has not been disconnected yet, and while the elderly person thinks he’s calling the police, the con man plays the role of a policeman on the other side of the line.
- Remember that you are safe in your home.
- Remember that no institution requires money, especially put under the bench, under a car or thrown out the window.
- You should know that for more than 10 years the police in Bulgaria is civil and there are no ranks (sergeant, major, colonel, what the con men pretend to be).
"Almost every time the con men say that you must keep a secret and do what they have been told. It is important for the elderly person to be told that when they hear that they have to keep a secret, as well as the sentence that they have to give money, it means it is a scam.
"This meeting was very useful for me, said the student Kiril Ivanov, who is involved in the project. “I've learned new things about how these people operate and I will readily give this information to the elderly. We have a lot of work to do and meet 2,500-3,000 elderly people from clubs in Varna. They tried to trick me and I know that this is a big problem."
"We discussed different situations, and the meeting proved to be useful to me. An acquaintance of mine told me yesterday that they tried to trick him. So the problem affects us all - not just the elderly people," said the student in architecture Dorothea Nikolaeva.