Liliane is 98 years old and lives in the district of Morges, in the canton of Vaud. In early April, she received a call from someone posing as a bank employee: there had been suspicious activity on her account, and they were going to send a police officer to collect her card. The same old story.
What the con artist hadn’t reckoned on was that Liliane had been reading the papers. She knew exactly what was going on. She hung up, called her neighbour—who happened to be a police officer—and then started ‘looking’ for the card in her drawers, playing dumb to buy some time. By the time the fake policeman arrived at her door, the neighbour was already waiting. The man was detained until a patrol car arrived.
"I can't take any credit for it; we'd been warned about these fake policemen in the newspapers," he said afterwards. At 98 years old, he's wiser than many.
Liliane’s story is heart-warming, but the underlying figures are worrying: in 2025, in the canton of Vaud alone, 936 cases of this scam were reported. One million four hundred thousand francs in losses. And most of the victims didn’t call any neighbours. If you have elderly relatives in Switzerland, the rule is simple: neither the police nor the bank will ever call to ask you to hand over your card. Never. Anyone who calls to do that is always a scammer.