This week, W5 reveals a scheme designed to part seniors with their hard-earned savings. This shameful crime is based primarily in Canada and targets elderly here and in the United States. On Saturday, Nov. 27 at 7 p.m. ET on CTV, W5’s Victor Malarek examines “The Grandson Scam” a sophisticated fraud run by heartless criminals who exploit a grandparent’s love for their grandchild. In the second story, “Pirates of Newfoundland”, W5 takes viewers to Harbour Grace for a look at the little-known history of Canada’s pirates and the hunt for 400-year-old pirate “treasure”.
W5 repeats Sunday, Nov. 28 at 12 noon on CTV and at 1 p.m. ET on CP24, and Monday, Nov. 29 at 8 p.m. ET on Investigation Discovery, and then on demand on the CTV News Video Player at CTV.ca (visit CTV.ca for local listings).
It’s hard to imagine anyone heartless enough to take advantage of the love a grandparent feels for a grandchild. But right now, somewhere in Canada, a conman, posing as a relative, is persuading an elderly person to dip into their hard-earned savings to help a grandchild supposedly in trouble. “The Grandson Scam” is running rampant across Canada and the United States, costing caring grandparents tens of millions of dollars a year. As Victor Malarek reports, grandparents like Gretchen Geary, and Joan and Scott Snell from Pennsylvania all were scammed by someone who sounded just like their grandson. Each time the caller, posing as their grandson, needed money to get out of a sticky situation with the law in Canada, the victims wired it through Western Union or their agents. The search for the fraudsters has involved law enforcement agencies in Canada and the United States and has called into question the efforts of the money transfer industry to protect customers against fraud.
In the second story, “Pirates of Newfoundland,” W5 hunts for pirates in Newfoundland. Not the kind the modern-day hijackers of freighters or oil tankers; rather, the notorious pirates from four centuries ago. Forget fictional pirates like Long John Silver or Jack Sparrow. The meanest pirate of his day was Peter Easton, whose home port was in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland. Easton, a former British naval officer turned pirate, preyed mercilessly on Dutch, Spanish, and French shipping fleets, amassing a fortune in booty. W5 heads to Conception Bay to join archeologists and divers on a mission to find a wreck from Easton’s fleet that sank off the shores of Newfoundland 400 years ago. What they find is proof of a pirate history that is still little known and under appreciated.
