READING, Pa. \u2014 Scrolling through YouTube, you may have come across a video with a person sitting in front of a microphone, promising seniors an easy way to stop paying property taxes.<\/p>\n
But that person is not real, and neither are the claims they make in the video.<\/p>\n
“They are claiming that there are all of these real estate tax breaks that we are concealing from the public, especially seniors,” says Susan Kissling, Chief Assessor for Berks County.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of AI-generated videos, from hundreds of different accounts, popped up recently, promising seniors an “age-based exemption” or “special form” that freezes or eliminates their property taxes.<\/p>\n
“…We don’t have them. They don’t exist,” said Kissling.<\/p>\n
Kissling says her office has been getting dozens of calls from confused seniors.<\/p>\n
“When this woman insisted that we have the forms, we’re just not giving them to her. That’s when we decided that this was something that needed to be addressed,” said Kissling.<\/p>\n
The woman says she’s never seen anything like these videos before.<\/p>\n
“We haven’t found the motive yet… They’re just giving misinformation to the seniors,” said Kissling.<\/p>\n
The videos don’t ask for money, but in the description, some have links to books or one-on-one courses.<\/p>\n
“Scammers are just really, really good at sort of targeting that information and those emotions for people and getting them to react to situations,” said Jessica Jones, director for the Berks County Area Agency on Aging,<\/p>\n
Jones says if something sounds too good to be true, call a family member, friend, or even the Office of Aging.<\/p>\n
“We may not have all the answers, but we can at least talk to the individual and help them work through some better next steps to really think about a plan logically,” said Jones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. \u2014 Scrolling through YouTube, you may have come across a video with a person sitting in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265609,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[112127,349,70567,10871,112128,128,130,129,100005,28949,112129,17292,35648],"class_list":["post-265608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-ai-generated-video","tag-berks-county","tag-fraud-prevention","tag-misinformation","tag-property-tax-scam","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-scammers","tag-senior-citizens","tag-social-engineering","tag-tax-exemption","tag-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}