I'm helping Shaniqua Ngulumbulu get her uncle's gold out of Nigeria!
It'll be here any day now! :-P
Posted on 10/19/2008 6:36:05 AM PDT by Dysart
New Mexico state Rep. Bill Rehm has heard the line more than once, so when a Traveller came calling to his Albuquerque home in March, he recognized the scam.
"They must go to college to learn this line," said Rehm, a retired sergeant with the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department, recalling the pitch: " 'We are working on a [paving] job just down the street, and we can do your driveway for $2 a square foot. Today. Right now.’ He said they had over-ordered materials."
Rehm turned the Traveller away, but others weren’t so savvy.
This spring and summer, some Travellers — nomadic clans of Irish, English and Scottish descent — roamed the country soliciting construction jobs and home repair work, bilking people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to law enforcement officials and a Traveller who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity.
"It is crazy how much money can be made," the informant said. "You can make $100,000 a week."
From New Mexico to Iowa to Washington state, officials warned residents about swindlers — including some Irish Travellers based in the Fort Worth area — rolling through their towns.
Still, plenty of people got taken. And only a handful of Travellers got arrested.
"A lot of cops don’t understand about the Travellers," said Lt. Mike Moore of the Casper, Wyo., Police Department, who believes that the public needs to be better-informed about the clandestine group. "These people are very, very good. They are masters at their trade. I’m not going to say all of them are scam artists, but it is unfortunate that you have to go to the press and tell people, 'Watch out, they are about to take your money.’ "
(Excerpt) Read more at star-telegram.com ...
Careful - it’s bad luck to insult the Wee Folk.
You don't have to worry about that...quite yet...
It’s amazing they aren’t exposed more in public media...I would say they give those of us with Irish heritage a bad name but rather have concluded their problem is too much inbreeding! Strange, devious Clan they are.
Roof and driveway repairs are only part of their operations. They will try to talk their way into the house with some excuse like using a bathroom. After they are gone the owner will discover things missing like, cash, jewelry, checkbook and credit cards.
I'm helping Shaniqua Ngulumbulu get her uncle's gold out of Nigeria!
It'll be here any day now! :-P
Travelers?
Bill Paxton & Mark Wahlberg: “Traveller” (1997)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120366/
A young man, Pat, visits the clan of gypsy-like grifters (Irish Travellers) in rural North Carolina from whom he is descended. He is at first rejected, but cousin Bokky takes him on as an apprentice. Pat learns the game while Bokky falls in love and desires a different life.
Marky Mark a Traveller? Not plausible— no wonder I missed it.
Next thing you know Hollywood will have us believe he could be plucked off the streets and inserted onto a professional football team.
True what they say about suckers but my concern is for the elderly victims. What is it about them that they become such easy prey for con men when in younger yrs many of them would never be counted among the “sucker set.” It’s almost as if certain of their survival instincts/defenses break down with age.
The other way around, I think! I spent about five years deeply researching these people and trying to sell articles about them, as I lived in a So. Cal apartment complex deluged annually with Scottish Travelers, then moved to Florida in the thick of Irish Travelers.
I'm impressed with this article, what I've read so far. Most of the time, editors don't want to touch it because they don't believe that the stuff is true. It sounds too much like a TV show. But Travellers really do speak a weird language in order to keep outsiders from understanding their conversations, that sounds like near-English gibberish. They really do arrange marriages when kids are infants, first-cousin marriages are very common, the boys are pulled out of school before their teens (girls are allowed to stay longer because they can learn math and how to keep checkbooks), and girls DO NOT EVER VENTURE ANYWHERE without a chaperone, even if it's another girl.
They drink a lot and fight and beat the hell out of each other but NEVER raise a finger against their kids; the Traveller who abuses a child is ostracized; their kids never go to college, they NEVER have pets such as dogs or cats. The Travellers' entire world revolves around their children.
They are VERY ostentatiously Christian; church plays a very big part in their lives, but family dominates all. Unmarried women do not live on their own; they live with relatives until they die. Kids usually sleep in the same room as the parents (nothing kinky about it, I don't think, just that way because these people always are ready to disappear right now, to evade the law). One of the biggest scams ever tried against Walt Disney Company in Florida was pulled by a Traveler (I got to spend an afternoon interviewing her -- Wanda Mary Normile was really something and I liked her very much; she was working hard to get out of the lifestyle).
That's all hard enought to believe; on top of that, when editors want the writer to have arrest records and quotes from local cops -- well, these people rarely get arrested, vice cops have "failed" (the wrong word, really) at getting them for generations, the vast majority of cops don't even know who these people are or that they exist, and editors think you're making it up. I sold a few stories to various publications, but finally gave up.
Truth with Irish and Scottish Travelers is defiinitely FAR more bizarre than fiction.
I was just playing on the old L&O promo, “Ripped From Today’s Headlines!”
As I said in a later post, I’ve been aware of them since the early 70’s. There is also a small enclave in a neighboring county.
In Britain, Travellers (white gypsies) are called Tinkers. They are born and bred to scam and con, from birth to death, generation after generation after generation. People who think they're too smart to be conned are babes in the hands of Travellers.
Yes, you’re in Virginia, I see, and I know that Irish Travellers are thick in your neck of the woods. They are something else, aren’t they!!!
The ones near me, I believe, are Scots.
We chuckled about that video, as it appeared to him, as it appeared to me, that none of the hits seemed to connect with the child in question, and it was also very inconsistent with Travelers EXCEPT as a means to frighten the kid into fear of being beaten. Like a puff adder puffs up in size to scare his enemies, Traveller moms may pretend and make a lot of noise and flurry to scare their kids. Therefore I was not in the least surprised to read that the kid had zero signs of physical trauma.
I am surprised that Scots are what you have there. Scottish Traveleres, at least when I wrote about them in the mid 90s, typically lived in large, luxury apartments for six months out of the year -- not in trailers traveling between trailer parks on a semi-permanent basis, like Irish Travelers. Scottish Travelers make even more money than the Irish and from what I was able to discern, have very few if any even relatively permanent homes. But then again, these people adapt and adjust and change, so what was true about them ten years ago may not be true today.
Tell me more about your group! I'm curious! What do they drive, and where do they live?
That’s interesting!
I know next to nothing about them. Just happened to pass by on a drive with a neighbor one day and he pointed it out. It was in Randolph Co. This area is full of Scots, German and Swiss from waaaay back, which is why I said I thought they were Scots. I could be wrong.
Just like many places in WV, If there’s a wide, flat spot on the road, there’s a community. Here though, there was a profusion of 70’ trailers, but not laid out like a trailer park...all haphazzard. There are also a few buildings and many large, brand new pick-up trucks and truck mounted RV caps.
I didn’t stop to talk to the natives. };^)
Big luxury apartment complexes with (this is key) secure underground parking garages are homes of the Scottish Travellers. In our complex, they returned year after year, and themanager told me that something like 37 families had rented apartments there (another huge number of them had taken up in a big complex about five miles away in a neighboring So Cal city) The women were fanatically clean, scrubbing baseboards of the doorways with toothbrushes several times a week, apparently washing their linen every single day, and their hands were always rough and red from overuse of cleansers.
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