BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) - Federal investigators in Boston on Tuesday charged 13 people in connection with what they describe as a “cruel and malicious” grandparents scam that resulted in hundreds of elderly people losing millions of dollars.

The scam, which targeted elderly victims, involved callers posing as grandchildren desperately in need of money because of an emergency. The suspects then allegedly used rideshare services to transport money from the victims’ homes to middlemen in the United States, then to the Dominican Republic.

It’s the kind of scheme that Vermont consumer protection officials says fall into the category of a relationship imposter scam, which represents about seven percent of all scams in the state.

The most frequent scams are in the computer tech support realm

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