I half think she put herself in this position.
Then again, conmen prey on the weak.
They should be tied to a post, beat within an inch of their lives, left in the desert for a three days and summarily shot.
I wonder how/if she votes. Maybe she’s trying to prove the Gruber idiot correct.
Greed is rewarded often with failure.
Naive & trusting is not the same as "Stupid".
Possible borderline senility is not "Stupid".
Many, many people "intelligent" people are susceptible to scams.
With the ‘greying of America’ elder abuse seems to have become widespread. Very sad.
One headline in my small town paper:
Caregiver faces felony charges for missing jewelry
Police Deptments in New York State seem to be joining the party with the confiscation of firearms from homes of the recently deceased after their funeral.
What is a 90 year doing with $70,000 in savings. It should be in a trust of some kind. Think ahead.
Some people are just innately stupid all their lives, but there have also been some studies in the past few years showing that changes in people’s brains as they age beyond about 75-years-old leads to a certain tendency towards gullability. Makes them very vulnerable to salesmen and scammers.
I frankly saw this with my own father, when he reached that age. He used to be about as sharp and as wary as they come. A very deliberative man. Extremely cautious and conservative about money and expenses, and very suspicious towards solicitors. But some guy came to his door soliciting money for veterans, without any credentials or anything, and my father wrote him a big $500 check, which was way, way out of his budget. Shortly afterward, my father sort of came to his senses, and he himself just couldn’t believe what he had done.
What does the fact that she was a vets wife have to do with her being stupid and greedy?
The elderly are easy prey because they are so trusting. Plus many at a certain age just don’t have the mental faculties they once did.
I couldn’t read the article properly on this device, but I didn’t see anything about children or other family. We youngsters really have to look out for our older family and friends, take an active interest in their finances, in order to protect them from these vultures.
How would you feel if this were your Grandmother/Mother? You sound a little like someone who still knows everything.
Greed causes many people to fall. My wife’s aunt fell to a Jamaican Scam.
Beware “green dot” scams.
Local couple got a call their grandson was in jail, needed $4K to get him out. They were told to send CVS giftcards or something like that with a green dot (supposedly untraceable).
The thing about confidence rackets is that the con man presents an opportunity, and the mark does most of the work convincing himself.
A shame.
aren't the old supposed to be wise?....isn't it an old phrase that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is?....
She agreed to it. It’s the L(l)ibertarian/lawyers’ party way.
Bingo!
I’m sorry, but ..... *sigh* .. OK, there is just no justifying this level of stupid. None.
I used to wonder however what sort of people would fall for what I would see right off as such obvious scams, thinking only truly stupid or feeble minded or insanely greedy people would ever fall for them.
Then a few years back my older brother who is not at all a stupid person, a good conservative guy and not someone I would think of as gullible (unlike his wife, my SIL), but after having been out of work for quite a long time and pretty desperate for work, and having posted his resume on line on Career Builder and Monster, he got an email for a job offer for printing invoices from home and mailing them to their US clients. It was allegedly from some “international company” allegedly based in Switzerland, and the email explained it was cheaper for them to email PDF’s of their US invoices to a US based contractor and for that contractor to print and mail here rather than for them to mail from overseas. They would pay him something like $15 per hour plus expenses, guaranteeing him at least 25 to 30 hours of work a week. Not so much a ridiculous amount to necessarily make one suspicious.
My brother had previously worked at a print shop and thought that’s why they were interested in his resume. They didn’t ask for any money up front, but in fact told him they would send him a very generous check to use to buy supplies up front; a laser printer, labels and envelops per a list they would send him, but that he would have to send them back the difference in no less than one week.
When he told me and his daughter about it, we told him that it was a scam and to not go through with it. At first he didn’t believe us. But bit of internet research on our part, and of his son who my niece and I called, on the name of this supposed company brought up all sorts of scam warnings.
Basically what this scammer and other similar ones will do is mail a fraudulent check drafted on a foreign bank account that either didn’t really exist or didn’t belong to the scammer (a high-jacked account number taken from a real canceled check from real company that had been “washed”).
The person falling for the scam will deposit the check and wait for their bank to “clear it” which it would at least according to their bank, because they’d see the money in their account after a few days or up to a week later, then they would go out and buy the supplies and then under the terms of the contract, wire transfer back via something like Western Union to the scammers, the unspent portion of their up fronted expenses, often to the tune of several hundred dollars.
But it often takes time for a bank, even if they initially “cleared” or credited the deposit to your account to find out it is not legit and then reverse the deposit. In the meantime, you’ve wired money out of your own personal funds back to the scammer. And even worse these scammers will also ask for things like your SSN and DOB and your personal banking details so they can “direct deposit” your pay and expenses. And to make matters even worse, you’d get an email with a supposed PDF attachment of your first batch of invoices to print and or embedded links that contain nothing but malware. So you basically end up paying a scammer to steal your identity under the pretense of a job offer. EVIL!
Fortunately my niece and I were able to convince him it was a scam before any damage was done, before he had replied to the scam job offer.
I occasionally get these scam “work from home” emails, which usually end up in my spam box and get sent right to the trash bin. I also on rare occasions get one of those Nigerian emails. I read them because they are so ridiculous as to be funny. But the sad thing is the reason these scams continue to exist, while most people recognize them as scams, sending out millions of these emails, it only takes a very few people to fall for them to make it profitable for the scammers.