Consumer Reports
By Chris Hansen, Dateline Correspondent
We’d been hearing complaints from senior citizens and government regulators across the country about the tactics some insurance salesmen are using to sell certain investments to retired folks. I’m a long ways off from retiring, but it’s an important subject to me because my mom’s close to that age and my aunts and uncles are already there. Given the turbulence we’ve seen on Wall Street, it seems like everyone is re-evaluating or repositioning their investments and would like to have their money in a safe place. And that’s what a lot of salesmen are pitching these days.
The investments are called equity-indexed annuities. They may be appropriate for some, but not for everyone. Why are so many people trying to sell these to retired folks? Simple: that’s where the money is. Seniors control more than $15 trillion in today’s economy and for the salesmen, these annuities pay healthy commissions.
Dateline decided to use hidden cameras to find out what salesmen were really saying or not saying to seniors when peddling these investments. We attended some of those “free lunch” seminars put on for potential clients, classes where salesman are taught the tricks of the trade. We wired some houses in communities where a lot of retired people live, so we could see the one-on-one pitch play out in real time.
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If you’re like most Americans, you know all too well how pervasive credit card fraud is. You might have been a victim yourself. A few years ago, I got a call from my bank asking if I had charged $24,000 dollars at a store in New Zealand? I most certainly had not, but I had bought my son something on a Website that apparently was not secure and thieves were able to obtain and use my number.
In a groundbreaking investigation a year in the making, we’ll take you into the thieves markets on the Internet where your stolen credit card numbers and identity information could be for sale at this very moment. Very seldom are we able to infiltrate a criminal syndicate the way we do in the case of our investigation into identity theft and credit card fraud.
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by Jesamyn Go, Dateline web producer
Parents of teenagers know all too well: When it comes to holiday presents, kids want tech toys.
“Every year, they want laptops or iPods, always something along those lines of technical gadgets,” says John Armand, 46-year-old Dateline producer and father in a blended family of six kids — five of them teenagers.
But in a world where most teens know more about computers than their parents, and where there’s always an unseen danger — like predators lurking in chat rooms and social networking sites — what’s a parent to do?
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