The Scam of it All

My wife told me about a "strange call" she received yesterday. She works graveyard and he apparently woke her up, telling her, her son was involved in a car accident, he been drinking, was in jail and charged with vehicular assault and DUI. This person "represented" a public defender's office and was doing her son a "favor" by asking for money to post bail on his behalf.

My wife doesn't do anything over the phone and told the caller she will look in this by calling her son and hung up. To verify if the report was correct, she contacted the hospitals in the area, the police and sheriff department, plus her son's attorney, and finally her son himself. To her relief, he was not involved in an accident nor was he being jailed. It was a scam and my wife did the correct thing by not panicking and sending this person her credit card number before verifying if the information was true.

To often though, it becomes the fault of the victim as much as the scammer who makes these call. They are predators and are feeding on a parent's worse fear; the child is hurt or been arrested and needs their help. But, rather than verify if this is true, by contacting the son or daughter or even the police, they panic and send this scammer, pretending to be a concerned "friend" money or credit card information.

This type of scam is one of hundreds performed each and every day on unsuspecting people. In my wife's case, the scammer apparently knew her son, but didn't know her and just assumed she was a gullible person who would willingly sacrifice her hard earned money for anyone without verification first. She might have appeared scatter brained to this person the first time she met him--I'm thinking this person is her son's personal friend or acquaintance.

That is another part of the problem, where these scams arte involved, don't be a patsy.  In other words, if you go on the internet to browse, a pattern emerges that gives these scammer ammunition. It is like the old pick pockets and casual thieves of the past, where they find their "mark" by casually observing people's behaviors and how aware they appear of their surroundings. These scammers are no different. 

Early on I received enormous amounts of emails telling me I have won a lottery in Nigeria, or some other concocted scheme. I never fell for it because, it appeared too good to be true, plus they obviously didn't know me. I don't enter lotteries or raffles of any sort. I don't gamble, but they apparent figured, because I worked at a tribal casino, that I also gambled.

Obviously, these email scammers left me long ago when I deleted their emails and found easier marks to pick on. But, that doesn't mean they aren't out there still. Last spring someone posing as a Microsoft representative sent me an email telling me I had been hacked by someone in Russia and needed to call this number right away.

Instead I went on-line  to the Microsoft site and chatted with a representative there. He told me that Microsoft never contacts people if they are being hacked. Could you imagine the pure volume of calls that they would have to make each day? It's totally unrealistic. He gave me a Microsoft website to go on and report this scam to them.

I don't normally get calls from people, mostly because I know the secrets of telemarketing since I was once one myself. When a telemarketing call is placed upon anyone, it runs on an automated dialer system. Because each call is selected for each representative, it is like placing eggs in an egg carton; there is a slight two to three-second pause before the connection is finally made. When I hear that slight pause, I know it is a telemarketer, and I usually hang up. Most people don't, but instead, thinking there is a bad connection, will stay on the line repeatedly answering the call, "Hello?" "Hello?" until the csr comes on the line.

I'm proud of my wife because she isn't prone to doing anything spontaneous. She doesn't go into a panic, but normally thinks things through, as everyone should. But, like I stated earlier, these people are looking for a patsy to take their money. As P.T. Barnum once stated, "There is a sucker born everyday."