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Scammers Pretending to Be Grandchildren Are Robbing the Elderly

A made-up family emergency. A desperate call. And a fraud designed to make you believe every word

DECEMBER 2026 / JUSTICE

Scammers Pretending to Be Grandchildren Are Robbing the Elderly

A made-up family emergency. A desperate call. And a fraud designed to make you believe every word

ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL BYERS

Published 5:45, SEPTEMBER 24, 2026

On March 2, 2023, Charles Gillen boarded a flight from St. John’s to Montreal, carrying an absurd amount of cash: around $3,600 in his wallet, plus $11,600 in an envelope and $16,050 in a sock packed in his carry-on. Earlier, the twenty-three-year-old had shipped two UPS packages filled with more than $36,000 in cash to an address in Montreal.

All of the money had been voluntarily handed to him by sixteen people between the ages of seventy and eighty-eight who were led to believe it was to bail their grandchild out of jail. “Todays booming,” someone texted Gillen the day before, along with the details of his flight that they had arranged for him. Over three days in Newfoundland and Labrador and two weeks in Nova Scotia, Gillen had collected $138,200 from the victims.

After settling into his plane seat, Gillen spotted police officers headed down the aisle toward him. He pulled out his phone and, according to court documents, texted three quick words to an unknown recipient: “I got caught.”

What Gillen had been caught doing is known as a “grandparent scam,” sometimes referred to as an emergency scam—a fraud in which elderly people are manipulated into believing their grandchild is hurt, arrested, or in serious trouble and must pay for the child’s safety.

According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, approximately 28 percent of the total amount of money stolen each year through scams in Canada is from seniors—adding up to more than $644 million, an increase of nearly 300 percent since 2020. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission said in August 2025 that some of the fastest-growing fraud schemes are targeting older adults and use fear and urgency to override good judgment.

Financial consequences are one thing. Emotional tolls are another. When Gillen eventually went to court, three of his victims, whose identities are protected by a publication ban, wrote statements that were read out. One victim, who was falsely told by the scammers that her granddaughter was in trouble, wrote that she experienced trauma and fear of living alone and had to sleep at a relative’s home. She wrote that there are not enough remaining years in her life to forget what happened to her.

“I could never imagine that I would have to endure such an emotional upheaval in my elderly years,” she wrote. “I shall never forget the sound of this man posing as a lawyer, the voice of this young girl impersonating my granddaughter. . . . I relive it daily and will remember it until the day I die.” (Gillen declined to speak to The Walrus for this story.)

Gillen may have walked up the front steps of his victim’s homes, looked them in the eye, and collected thousands of dollars they believed were helping out their grandchild, but he was just one cog in a much larger assembly line of deception.

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Grandparent scams likely evolved out of mass emails that linked to fraudulent websites or contained computer viruses that could steal a password. Those were a trawling net cast wide in the hope of catching anything. Grandparent scams are a harpoon: direct, personal, targeted.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center has been receiving reports about grandparent scams since at least 2008, but in the past few years, the scale and scope of these kinds of cons have expanded at an alarming rate across North America. “A lot of the threats have become social engineering threats,” says Macaulee Cassaday, co-founder and program director of the Canadian nonprofit Cyber-Seniors, which provides free tech support and training for seniors. These are threats that exploit psychology rather than computer software. Whereas previous scams used to be more easily identified through bad grammar in an email or other visual cues, grandparent scams are deeply elaborate in their creation and manipulation. “You have to look for the tactics the scammers are using,” Cassaday says, “rather than these outright signs.”

The most common grandparent scam follows a pattern: a scammer phones an elderly person pretending to be their grandchild. The scammer says they have been arrested and are in desperate need of cash for bail. Sometimes the story is the grandchild has been in a car crash or that police found drugs in their vehicle. Sometimes a second scammer will come on the line, pretending to be the grandchild’s lawyer or a law enforcement official, deepening the scam. The victim is urged to keep everything a secret, either to protect the grandchild from embarrassment or because the scammers say a court has issued a gag order over the case. The grandparent is then told that a courier or bail bondsperson will come to their home to pick up the needed cash.

Grandparent scams require advance planning and data mining to gather names, phone numbers, and personal details—from where grandchildren live and go to school to terms of endearment used between relatives. While some of these operations are halted at banks, where a teller becomes suspicious of a sudden large withdrawal of cash or a family member intervenes just in time, many of them slip through the cracks.

Last November, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Richmond, British Columbia, received an influx of reports about elderly residents being targeted by scammers claiming to be representatives from a foreign embassy abroad and saying that their loved one was in custody and needed bail money quickly.

“These days, it’s so out of hand,” says Richmond RCMP corporal Frank Bryson. He says he gets phishing calls himself, multiple times a day, on his work and personal cellphones. Some offer jobs or romance, while others pretend to be the Canada Revenue Agency. “I couldn’t believe how good it was and how........

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