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I just spoke to an elderly sister in Oklahoma who told me she received a phone call on Sunday from a man at a supposed Dallas number. The caller said he was my sister's grandson and he needed $9,000 as he had been taken to jail for the possible possession of narcotics. The caller also told my sister he had a cold and this was the reason his voice sounded different and the reason he had gone to the drug store to get something for the cold when he had been stopped. The caller apparently had additional family information to make it sound as if he was real.
Luckily, my sister did not respond with any money but asked her husband and her son, a former county sheriff and a current FBI agent, respectively, to respond to this thug. Even today on Monday my sister still sounded very shaken by this experience. She thinks this person may have gotten the family information from her grandson's mom's Facebook page but many of us have family information scattered about, willingly and unwillingly, on the internet at various genealogical sites.
I post this here just in case these low-lifes try this, or something similar, on any other unsuspecting elderly persons.
This one has been making the rounds for a long time. Sometimes they say they were arrested after a bar fight/auto accident and their voice sounds different due to a broken nose.
No, not new at all. They get information from social media sites, so if the elderly person isn't careful about what is shared online and with whom, it's all there for the taking.
Thank you for a timely reminder, High Plains Retired. This happened to my folks and I contacted the FBI, who told me to tell them not t answer any phone number they did not recognize. It shook us all up, but we all started doing that.
Thanks!
At this point if someone falls for this stuff... then they are not listening or are pretty stupid.
My Dad is a retired metallurgical engineer who started investing in his 30s. He's hardly stupid but he fell for that scheme a few years ago when he was in his early 80s- he panicked because it was supposedly a granddaughter who works in health care and she'd been in a car with friends and didn't know till they'd been arrested that the driver had drugs on her... he was really afraid that she'd become unemployable if she were arrested. My brother, a CPA, now has some sort of control over Dad's account so he can't wire out large amounts.
When my mother was alive she'd gotten a similar call but supposedly from my son, who had been arrested after getting drunk at a bachelor party. The person hung up after Mom reminded "DS" several times that he was a teetotaller. What's weird is that DS doesn't have my last name, neither he nor Mom were on FB and we all live in separate states.
I hope there's a special place in hell for people who do this stuff.
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