Scam Alert
Here’s a scam alert. So, I had a conversation with a friend this morning. His wife went to the hospital to check on her mother who had just been admitted. Upon arrival, her mom said, “Can you take that bag over there and make sure it gets to the man on the voice mail?” She asked what it was about, and her mom replied, “Well, don’t tell anyone, but Cody (name changed) has been arrested for possession of marijuana, and the money is to bail him out.”
She left the hospital with the bag. En route, she called her husband to tell him that she might be a while because she had to deal with the grandson’s arrest. Her husband (my mate) said, “that doesn’t sound right. Call his dad.” Luckily for all involved – except the scammer – she did so and dad replied that he was pretty sure his son was at work where he was supposed to be in their family business. Sure enough, a call to the shop confirmed Cody was at work.
Police No Use
They of course called the police who said there was nothing they could do. I’m going to follow up with my police mates and find out if that is indeed the case. These particular cops might simply not be bothered. Sometimes there is nothing they can do, especially when it’s an international or out-of-state matter. I’d like to think someone could at least try and trace the phone the guy called from or figure out how he got hold of her name and made the connection to the grandmother.
Lesson In It For Everyone
These scams are a dime a dozen and I blogged about some a week or so ago. In fact the Federal Trade Commission logged 10,000 plus of this particular one in 2015. If you have grandparents contact them and let them know about it. The parasites who perpetrate these have zero qualms about wiping out some old person’s bank account and leaving them destitute. The obvious defense, if you get a call about a family member in trouble, is to call them before doing anything. You’ll still have time to help if it turns out to be an emergency. You won’t be scammed if it isn’t.
PS: Not the only way it’s done. Sometimes they want you to wire money and other times they tell you that you can pay with a credit card.
An elderly female from my home town lost $240k to this exact scam. It’s baffling how that much can be gleaned before anyone finds out, but it’s going on.
Yep, very sad. If she hadn’t been admitted to hospital they’d have never discovered it. The bank even called her son to double check she was okay removing that much money and he assumed it was to pay a medical bill or in-home nursing.
A lucky catch.
It’s almost impossible to catch anyone out of these scams. All the calls and criminals are outside of the USA. The people who pick up and deliver the money are scam victims themselves.
We set up a fake money delivery from one of these scams after our resident reported it last year. The woman that picked up the money was the victim of a “lottery tax” scam. She had been told she won a lottery prize but had to pay taxes to get the money released.
The scammers gave her the name of our victim and told her that she had to pick up the “tax money” from another lottery winner and wire it in with her own “taxes” to the offshore account.
If they don’t have a simultaneous scam like this working, they ask for payments in untraceable gift cards or green dot money cards.
I don’t think we’ve ever caught one of these people and we have dozens of reports of similar scams every year.
Hey brother,
I was hoping you were reading that. Thanks for the insight. Very useful. Looks like the only defense is alert as many people as we can.