Gold Scam

Floor Speech

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, while I had the opportunity on the floor, I wanted to call to the attention of the Senate that the Special Committee on Aging, which I have the privilege of chairing, held a hearing last week on scams particularly affecting senior citizens--but not limited to senior citizens--in the selling of precious metals, in particular gold.

Basically, the bottom-line takeaway from the hearing is if you are an American getting a cold call suggesting to you that you should invest in a precious metal such as gold, more than likely it is a scam and you are about to be robbed of your money if you play along and start investing in this fictitious investment in gold. The testimony showed that most of the time the scammers do not even purchase the gold and certainly are not storing it--even though they are charging the poor victim, often a senior citizen, storage fees for this fictitious gold.

I was astounded. We are accustomed to getting telemarketer calls--unless you are on the Do Not Call list--but telemarketers still call through the Do Not Call list. That is another giveaway. If you are on the Do Not Call list and you are getting one of these calls to invest, they can make it sound so good.

We had a man who was about to be sentenced and was one of the telemarketers. Why do these scams often end up being from South Florida? But it is true--not only these kinds of scams, but also Medicare and Medicaid fraud. It is concentrated in South Florida. This man was a part of this scam calling unsuspecting Americans to get them to invest in something that sounds too good to be true, only it is the gold standard. People fell for it, and then they sent him money. He showed us. They have four different stages: someone who first gets you interested, someone who comes in and closes the deal, another person who comes along and then gets up the deal, and then others who keep you hooked into the scam until you find out that you don't have any gold that is being held in trust for you in storage but, in fact, it is all a sham.

I wanted to share with folks what the Senate Special Committee on Aging found out. If you get a cold call and they want you to invest in gold, chances are it is a scam and it is not real. It is a word to the wise: Beware. Don't fall for it.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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