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This morning once again I talked my friend out of opting into another internet scam. It was not easy, he was so determined to find a way to make money online, and he found an ad pasted onto a game site he goes to. It was E-Mobile Code, one of Ronnie Montano's scams, just like his other "Code" scams.
My friend, I'll call him Tom here, is 80 years old, has no internet skills at all and cannot even figure out how to Google this stuff and check it out. I have to do that for him. Nevertheless, he finds this stuff online, clicks on it, and gets sucked into the myth that anyone can make big money online just by clicking on things and watching the cash roll into their bank account! He's desperate and determined to find some way to bring in more money, and all he's got is his social security check, which they will most certainly take from him if they can.
Tom can be very stubborn when he gets onto one of these things, and it's really hard to talk him out of it. I thought I had talked him out of it yesterday, when I explained the skillset he'd have to have to make any money at all online, and doesn't have. Nor is he willing to learn that stuff, but this morning he was on the phone with them, giving them all kinds of information about himself and his financial life! Yeow!!!!
I tried to tell him not to give them any information and he just waved me off and kept talking to them. When he finally got off the phone I did my best again to tell him how they are going to take him to the cleaners, with one upsell after another and getting him in over his head in something he doesn't understand to start with and that can't work anyway. Of course they are counting on him not understanding.
Last year he got a call from a scammer in Jamaica who told him he'd won $4 million dollars and only needed to wire a processing payment of $400 via Western Union to claim it. The scammer threw in a new Mercedes Benz to sweeten the deal. I tried so hard to tell him it was a scam, showed him the call came from a Jamaica area code, showed him the videos on YouTube of Jamaican scammers, and he was still determined. He was out the door and on the way to Western Union, where I called him and finally talked him out of it, THANK GOD!
In researching this latest scam he got onto I found others explaining how it's scam, and then they try to sell you their OWN SCAM! "Yeah, this is a scam, but here's something legit you can do in your pajamas and make big money," and the circle of scamming repeats itself over and over and over like a snake eating it's tail. "Don't buy their scam, buy ours!"
And of course the scammers have paid lots of people to do testimonials and success stories about their scam and plaster them all over the internet and on YouTube. You have to have a pretty good BS filter to get to the bottom of it all. I'm not surprised that they suck Tom in so easily, he's really not internet savvy at all, and he's rather naive about such things. He's such a good and generous guy that he can't see a scam coming. I have to watch out for him, and so far I've been able to keep him out of trouble, but I fear that at some point he'll get into something he doesn't tell me about and they will take him for what little he has.
Poor Tom. What is he going to do when you aren't around? If he has children, they need to have a serious talk with him.
He sounds like he is a desperate person, and desperate people rarely think things through. Unfortunately, the only way someone like Tom will learn, (and ultimately . . . they still usually don't), is to let him fall for one of these scams and experience what happens. It is good that you will be there to pick up the pieces. Bless you for trying. I see no end to this.
I must have a pretty tough sales resistent online profile for my IP because have only seen a few obvious online scam offers, and very few email scams. Of course have never ever clicked on any link or popup that remotely smells rotten.
Phone calls are another matter. Some are pretty funny, once in awhile will chat and tease the caller and have some fun. The "Your grandson is in jail" and the "You have won a very large prize" scams seem to have died down, not gotten one of those in years. The latest, which has also died down for myself, is the "This is Microsoft, you have a very serious computer problem." LOL.
I got the "Microsoft computer problem" phone call last week, hung up on them within 10 seconds.
Helping out with police reports I've seen a lot of seniors who get sucked in by the grand kid in trouble or you've won a prize phone calls or mail notices. Strangest one I've seen is for some folks who sent money to advance the design of a magnet ad for the side of their cars, and they would get a monthly fee for driving around with the magnet ad.
I got the "Microsoft computer problem" phone call last week, hung up on them within 10 seconds.
Helping out with police reports I've seen a lot of seniors who get sucked in by the grand kid in trouble or you've won a prize phone calls or mail notices. Strangest one I've seen is for some folks who sent money to advance the design of a magnet ad for the side of their cars, and they would get a monthly fee for driving around with the magnet ad.
Sounds like the hot new scam, where they say they will pay you to have your car wrapped with an ad and drive it around, and it turns out to be yet another variation on the old fake check scam. It's just unbelievable how many different ways they try to run that scam, everything from jobs to renting apartments and selling anything online. Secret shopper is a big one for the fake check scammers.
I think it's worth noting that a lot of jobs out there online are support positions for the scammers, like payroll processor (you will be creating and mailing the counterfeit checks for the scammer) and post our ads for cash, in which you unknowlingly plaster their scam on every website you can for chickenfeed, which is how Tom came across the scam I talked him out of today. He saw one of their ads on a game site he goes to.
Okay so just to even things out a bit- in the lab where I work the public has access to the internet. More than once a week we have to try and convince someone, usually under 40, that they really aren't going to get a million dollars from their new "business associate", that they really shouldn't give their credit info out in an email or just today, if you give them a credit card number they are not going to credit your account with 5000 just for answering a few questions. More and more of us old folks are quite Internet savvy especially those of us on the young end of senior.
Turn off his router. He'll never figure out how to turn it back on.
Not a good idea, I live with him, and use that router too. Also, he'd go ballistic if he couldn't get to his webmail and games.
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