I Was Scammed by a Homeless Person... and Other Stories

Personal Experience | LoveUSA

[LoveUSA]

Just yesterday I was leaving the food store with my 83 year old mother in my car when we encountered an old woman holding a piece of cardboard that said "homeless" (quotes were included). This old woman made eye contact with me and her scraggly gray hair, her worn clothing, and her pathetic help me expression really stirred up my sympathy. When I stopped at the stop sign near where the begging woman was standing I said to my mother, "Let's give her some something, it's Christmas". We came up with a five dollar bill and my mother waved it out the window. The begging woman took it and smiled with the few teeth she had left.

Then the semi-toothless, pathetic-looking, scraggly-haired old woman said, "Thanks! My grandkids want a video game for Christmas."

[RegulatorCountry]

The scammers are very direct and waste no time launching into the tale of woe du jour. Heavy eye contact, too. A “newbie” genuinely down on his luck is embarrassed and lacks such aggressive confidence. They’re grateful for an offer of a hot meal, whereas the scammer will stalk off or even curse you. That’s what I noticed in over a decade of encountering them on a daily basis.

[Riley]

Best one I ever had was probably thirty years ago. I was standing on the platform in Oakland for some reason, waiting for a BART train. Some guy shambles up to me and starts speaking to me- but he has such a thick, mumbled black-English patois that I honestly couldn't understand a single word he was saying. I don't know if he was begging or threatening (no weapon displayed, but hostile manner) or giving me the secret to faster-than-light space travel.

I listened to his speil, paused for a moment, looked perplexed, and said, "I'm really sorry, but I didn't understand a f***ing word that you just said".

He left in a fury.

[mountainfolk]

Compassion. That is the word that recalled a conversation I recently had with a friend who had an experience with Compassion. They told me of a close younger relative who they met after many years and who acknowledged that their occupation was PANHANDLER. Asked how they made much of a living that way, the response was, “I never have less than $150 on me”. Then they explained that there were COMPASSIONATE people who always gave when asked.
Personally, I do not do this type of compassion because of so much personal observation of scam at low and high levels.

[exit82]

BTTT.

Thanks for starting a thread with so much wisdom in it.

[proudpapa]

It’s one thing to help an individual who truly needs help...

But it’s so foolish to hand money over to someone that you think is homeless because you feel some sort of “Christian” guilt.

Especially when there are many wonderful charities that do a terrific job helping those in real need. But handing money to the homeless almost always enables them to continue with their drinking/drug addiction.

My Bible also includes verses like Mark 14:7, Ezekiel 7:19, John 12:5 and Acts 3:6.

[MD Expat in PA]

Your story made my screen go all fuzzy! There are many scammers out there, and we should be wary of them, but it seems that too many people (myself included sometimes) forget that there are many who are truly in desperate situations and just need a little help and kindness. May God bless you for sharing with this lady and daughter!

Thank you but honestly it (the $5) was more of a spur of the moment thing and after I left I wondered how she might take it, even if she might have been offended. After all she wasn’t asking me for any help and while the two laundry detergent pods were no big deal to me - I didn’t want any money for them and wouldn’t even know what they were worth unless I remembered how much I paid for the bag and divided that cost by the number of pods in the bag, they were very important to her. She offered to pay something for them and it was me who decided that they were of so little monetary value to me that it wasn’t worth taking anything from her for them and she thanked me and offered a second time to pay for them after I told her just to take them, that I had plenty.

We only got to talking after I gave her some of my detergent. She really didn’t seem to be soliciting sympathy and didn’t go in to great detail, but it seemed to me more like she just needed someone to talk to, with me being an older woman, a mother figure perhaps. As I mentioned, her little girl was very cute and friendly but like most 2 year olds, a little rambunctious. The mom was doing her best to keep her quiet and entertained but it was hard – the kid wanted to be a kid and run around and was talking up a storm to me and I loved talking to her, I love toddlers (even though I couldn’t understand much of what she was saying). The mom apologized to me several times, seemly very concerned that Jordan was being too loud and rude, and then she made the comment “she’s been hard to handle since her dad left us, she talks back to me a lot, is rude sometimes….kind of like her dad was to us”. That’s when she made the comment about him not being ““very nice” to us”. She didn’t say much else about him but with that comment and the fading bruise on her cheek, I got the picture.

Slipping the $5 bill into her basket on my way out was as I said, was an impulse on my part. And I really hope she didn’t take it the wrong way. She didn’t impress me as someone who would ask for a handout but as someone who was trying to take care of herself and her daughter the very best she could. I hope she didn’t take it the wrong way. I wasn’t pitying her or feeling sorry for her but just saw a young woman with a young child who probably needed a little random act of kindness. The $5 would pay for another load of laundry, not much but something.