Alert: Old people getting scammed by evil Canadians
Posted: 8/12/2009 10:59:24 PM
By: Comfortably Anonymous
Times Read: 1,897
0 Dislikes: 0
Topic: Weird stuff

A scary/angering story, "Scammers Prey On Helpful Relatives" about people from Canada calling elderly Americans and telling them: "A loved one had gone to a friends wedding in Canada. Once up there, there had been a bad accident and although it was not their fault still their relative had gotten blamed for it and they were now sitting in a Canadian jail and needed money immediately."

They scammed $3,000 from an old man in Omaha and it doesn't sound like he's ever going to see that money again. I sure hope someone does something soon.

These same scammers tried it on my 93 year old grandmother just last Friday, same story and everything. (Other than the change about going to Canada for a friend's wedding.) Luckily she didn't give them any money, apparently the scammers phone call dropped before they could get to where to send it, thank Kdapt. But she was near tears all day thinking I was in jail in Canada. That's the part that really makes me mad, this is terrible.

The lame response from law enforcement was surprisingly terrible. Apparently telling old people "Just hang up next time" is considered good enough to the cops. The phone company (especially in the case of the old school wired landline at my grandmothers) keeps track of every number that calls any other number for a period of time.

Absolutely hands off to police normally.

But I'd think with my grandmother's written permission for them to see all of her phone interconnect records for the afternoon of the date it happened it'd be no issue. That way they can trace the call to the actual scammers and bust the parasites.

Bam, case actually closed, and either someone's in jail, or at least the cops have some good leads now.

Doesn't sound like too much work for it to be a reasonable expectation. A few hours of desk work, easy as surfing the net. How does one get that to happen? Not just for my grandmother, but for all the rest of the elderly victims out there.

If we can't even put forth the effort to lift a few fingers to protect our elderly from predators these days, then something's gone badly wrong with us as a society. Society was invented by the elderly.

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