Every year billions of dollars are stolen from people, many of whom are elderly, by frauds perpetrated over the phone, mail or internet. I’ve been caught in one and got tangled up in a couple of others before realizing they were poison and escaping.

What I learned will certainly help protect me going forward; perhaps my story will help you, too.

Seeing my elderly friend nearly scammed recently flicked a switch for me: if I couldn’t go after these criminals with a baseball bat, the next best response was to educate myself, then try to warn others. Here’s my first effort.

I’ll report here on two scams; one I fell for and one I didn’t.

Here’s the one I fell for. I received an email message from my friend “E.” “Do you do Amazon orders?” I replied that I did, and she responded, “I can’t get to the bank right now and my neighbor upstairs is celebrating her 70th birthday so I want to take her something. My bank cards are not working at the moment. Will you buy a gift card and send it to me to give her?”

The exchange sounded like “E” to me, and the email address was hers, so I bought a card and said, “OK, what next?” And “she” replied that I should send it to her, at an email address whose first half was indeed her username but the second half was different than I was used to. Unthinkingly, I did it anyway. Fifteen minutes later I decided I’d been fooled and tried to cancel the card. Too late: it cleared already. Fortunately, it wasn’t my life savings.

What happened here was E’s email had been hacked, and someone was sending this pitch to her contacts in her address book using her email address, then asking the gift cards to be sent to a similar but separate email where they could collect the cards quickly. Then they could delete the fake email address.

Two lessons I learned. First, if anyone asks me to buy a gift card for them, red flags go up — SCAM! And second, if the exchange seems a bit odd, especially if it’s asking me to stick my neck out by sending money or providing sensitive information, I’m going to reach out to the correspondent another way, perhaps by telephone. When my friend “C” got this gift card pitch, she simply called “E,” who told her that it was a hack.

My near goof-up was quite different, although when gift cards were mentioned, the red flags went up and I got out. I was selling a canoe on the internet. A texter expressed interest and said he’d send a certified check and arrange for a mover to pick up. When the check arrived it was for 50% too much. The texter claimed it was for the moving. I declined to get involved in that part, so he said, go to Walmart and buy a gift card for the difference and send that back. Then I dropped him, because by this time (duh) I was onto gift cards.

A little research reveals this about certified check scams: the check is bogus, and an overpayment is a standard part of the trick. It looks like the check went into your account alright the next day, so you return the overpayment in real money to the criminal. But a couple of weeks later, the bank realizes it’s never going to get any money from the remitting bank, so it deletes whatever is left of that money from your account and holds you responsible for the amount you took out to “repay” the buyer.

The lesson here: certified checks can be fake. Money in my account a day or two later doesn’t really mean the transaction is complete. You can deposit the check, but you’d better wait weeks to see if it really gets fulfilled before you give up anything yourself (the product for sale, or a repayment of overpayment, for example).

Oh, there are many tricks, and clever new ones arising every week. We’ve got to share what we learn and stop some of this. I’m too old to swing a baseball bat, anyway.

To learn more about the range of current scams, I have been consulting these two websites: aarp.org/money/scams-fraud (the retired people website) and consumer.ftc.gov/scams (the Federal Trade Commission website).

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John Omohundro lives in Saranac Lake. He is Professor Emeritus from SUNY Potsdam, so he should know better.