Beware The Phone Scammer First thing I would like to do is get something which annoys me off my chest. Sometimes I go onto a site with a news story and when I click on the title to read that story I am either being taken to a different story, a streaming advertisement, or a notice to turn off my ad blocker. I know that has had to have happened to some of you out there. As a person who runs a website, I think the worst thing another site can do is bait and switch. I know I would never even consider it. While it is annoying, there are a lot worse things going on. One of the things criminals are using to take advantage of people, especially old people is the phone. I have had many scams tried on me on my land line. In the last year I have had three different calls telling me a relative needs help and someone on the line impersonating them. The first one was about 6 months ago when I got a call, supposedly my grand son was arrested and needed bail money. It supposedly had something to do with him driving and an accident. The weird part was he sounded just like the grandson he was supposed to be. At the time his father was visiting me and said wait a second, my son didn’t drive, and didn’t own a car, then I hung up after a supposed lawyer was put on the phone. The second call occurred about two weeks ago from the writing of this article. It had the same script as the first one, with a different person pretending to be my grandson which I promptly hung up on. Last week I got another call and this time the party said they were my son and they were hurt very badly in a car accident. Again, I hung up. It made me think what some elderly people must be going through. Let’s face it, if the scheme didn’t work sometimes, there wouldn’t be all these calls. It may not take much to fool an older person and they could lose their meager life savings. There is a special place in hell for people pulling this stunt. I have had other calls over the years where money was trying to be extorted out of me. The most unique one I came across happened when I had a business. I got an order for a large number of items from a Nigerian. They even sent a bank check. The check was for a much greater amount of money and they had asked me to send them back the overpayment. The whole procedure stunk to high heaven. I decided there was something wrong and I would hold the check, not send the merchandise and see what happened. I never heard from them again. It turned out many bank checks had been stolen from this particular bank and this was there way of cashing the stolen checks. I held the check for a year just to make sure and in the end I destroyed it. I also received several calls from people claiming to be agents of government agencies. Here is the funny part about that. When I was much younger, my step father lost his job. I supported him for the entire tax year and put him as a dependent on that year’s tax. I received a call from someone claiming to be an IRS agent and he was threatening me and saying I owed several thousand dollars and I have to come to the office and bring the cash. I angrilly told him I wasn’t doing it and he said they would throw me in jail. Being much younger and angrier I said do it and hung up. I didn’t hear anything for a long time and then I received a letter from the district director of the IRS with an apology. It seemed the person claiming to be an IRS agent really was, but he was shaking down people and got caught. Many years later I started getting calls from people, some of which could hardly speak English claiming to be IRS agents. It was laughable and of course I would hang up. One time I even got a call from a supposed FBI agent. Then there were all the calls which were supposedly from Medicare. I certainly have had more than my share of these things. By the way I tried to report the telephone number of the callers to the police, they politely took the numbers but said they could do nothing. A report was made by CNBC in 2021 and it was found Americans lost 29.8 billion dollars to telephone scams the year before. It seems to me they have become more prevalent now so I expect that number is much higher today. The N.Y. Post reported a story about a teenager who got taken on a phone scam. She lived in Western Australia. She had been saving for her own home. She was working three different jobs at once. In December she got a text message which said it was from the bank and some unknown person was trying to transfer her funds. The message had the same address has previous messages from the bank. It told her she had to call a certain telephone number if she had not authorized the transfer. When she gave them all her info that was the end of her money. It is just so sad people can get away with this and ruin other’s dreams and sometimes their lives. CNN reported about a 17 years old boy who was scammed. He was the object of a sextortion case. The boy was a straight A student and a Boy Scout. He had gotten a phone call and the party was either a girl or someone making believe to be a girl. As they talked the conversation became sexual. The caller sent him a nude photo and then asked him to send one. Obviously they were using cell phones. When his nude photo was received the caller demanded $5,000 or they would make the photo public and also send it to his parents. The poor boy got so upset he committed suicide. They were actually responsible for his death. As far as I am concerned they murdered him. It is time people have to educate their children and their elderly relatives about these scams and just get them to hang up. It doesn’t pay to argue with them because you get nowhere and they might even find a way to get even.
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