On Thursday, WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge posted a story that was welcome news to the August 2016 flood victims, yours truly included.
The gist of the story was that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had waived the duplication of benefits provisions, clearing the way for flood victims who had to settle for SBA loans to rebuild their homes to receive compensation from FEMA through Restore Louisiana.
Until that provision was waived, anyone who did not receive FEMA funding was forced to accept the SBA loans. In some cases, as with me, victims were directed by FEMA reps to the SBA table to apply for loans. This was done without FEMA’s bothering to tell flood victims that if they accepted—or if they were even offered and declined—an SBA loan, they were automatically ineligible for other federal assistance.
So, as you might surmise, news of the waiver of the duplication of benefits stipulation was welcome news.
That story by WAFB-TV was posted at 8:41 a.m.
At 5:57 p.m., a scant eight hours later, I received my first scam call about my eligibility for federal assistance.
The call from Morgan City, my caller ID said. I know no one in Morgan City, but I answered anyway, thinking perhaps it may be someone with a tip for a story for LouisianaVoice.
Instead, it was a woman asking for me by name, although it took me about three or four tries to understand whom she was asking for. Then she launched into her spiel about my application, saying she need to confirm certain information. It took several times for that information to get through, which was just as well as it gave me time to wonder why someone would be calling from Morgan City about my FEMA application.
After asking her to repeat herself several times, the call was suddenly disconnected. When I tried to call back, I got the usual message on robo calls that the call could not be completed.
So, there you have it, folks. The scam artists are already busily scheming to prey on flood victims, some of whom still are not back in their homes and some, like me who, at 75, is saddled with a brand-new 30-year $125,000 mortgage.
The purpose of this is not to whine about my misfortune because to be honest, we fared better than many flood victims: we got an excellent general contractor who did everything he promised to do at the price he quoted—and he did excellent work.
The purposed of this is to put other victims on notice that the scammers are actively trying to steal your identity to bilk you out of anything you may have coming to you. You need to be alert to these people and NEVER divulge any personal information, including your Restore Louisiana application number, your social security number or anything else.
And just because my call showed up on caller ID as being from Morgan City (Area Code 985), that doesn’t mean diddly. They steal numbers so that it appears you are getting a local call. Your call may be from Hammond, Lafayette or anywhere, and from any area code.
DO NOT BE A VICTIM!
Tom, have you see any money from this waiver. I ran into friends a couple of days ago and they told be the feds still have not released the funds.
Not a dime. The duplication of benefits provision kept me ineligible until today.
Even AARP recommends not answering your phone if you do not know who is calling or caller id shows you calling yourself from that same number or some other obviously fraudulent number, caller unknown, out of area, etc. If that is the answer, it is, as Garret Graves might say, stupid.
The question becomes when will SOMEBODY address this? The FCC doesn’t seem to do much of anything anymore so I guess laws will have to be passed requiring telecommunications companies to address it. In either case, we will wind up paying for it.
One would think landlines useful for other reasons would be the first casualties of this. I pay a ridiculous amount for mine, but plan to work around the reason I keep it as soon as I can. Could it be that AT&T and the smaller providers would just as soon we all abandon landlines? If not, why are they not trying to protect us from such calls over landlines? Fraudulent cell calls are becoming increasingly prevalent and, no matter what numbers you block or software you load, the scammers figure a way around it quickly. I would seem that, if one of the cell service providers could come up with a way to defeat this, they could corner the market if others didn’t follow suit.
My relatively new Android cell phone now warns me if a call has been reported as spam and allows me to report and block calls that I do answer. That suggests that there are apps out there to do that for anyone.
For your home, MagicJack can be as little as $2.50 per month after the first year when you have to purchase the device and transfer your number. There are also Vonage and many other internet based phone services that are much less expensive than the the traditional phone companies.
At home we screen all our calls with the answer machine because probably over 99% are spam.
Many of us still will not get any money from Restore because we were told to raise our build to the parish requirements. nobody mentioned that to get the money we had to raise to HUD requirements which is 2 feet higher and a lot of us were finished when this information came to light. They say we can raise another 2 ft now to get the money but to what end it would cost about the same amount they give to raise again