Desperate Serbwife

A special place in Hell

There had better be a special place in Hell for those people who call old ladies on the telephone and scam them out of money. I just heard that my grandma just got scammed and I'm livid.

You see, my grandma is 86 and gets confused from time to time. She is also quite lonely now that she has lost her husband and most of her close friends. This scam started with a "really nice man" who calls her on the phone and talks to her for a while - which is nice for a lonely old lady to have someone nice to talk to. And he starts his little pitch about how he's got this great investment plan for her and all she needs to do is send him $4,000, and in only a couple of months, the money grows to $400,000. He explains how all this works, but it is quite confusing and my grandma figures that such a nice man wouldn't scam her and so whatever this complex deal is, it must be good, even if she doesn't totally understand it. So she goes to the bank and pulls out the money from the little bit in her savings account that she is living on and sends it to the "really nice man."

Of course, no one ever hears from the "nice man" again and my poor grandmother is not only out the money, but completely embarrased in front of her family because she fell for such a scam.

It has happened to thousands of older people who are duped by someone who actually treats them nicely on the phone and seems very honest. It makes me absolutely disgusted to think that there are people out there who can be so heartless as to prey on the lonely, vulnerable feelings of the elderly.

In the case of my grandmother, we have three lawyers in the family who can think of nothing more fun than to track these guys down and procecute them until they wished they were in Hell. However, many other families are not as well off and don't have any recourse.

You know, when politicians talk about the country becoming morally corrupt, these are the issues they should be bringing up - not some crap about how two men who want to marry would somehow hurt the rest of us. That wouldn't hurt me at all. But my grandma getting scammed, that's a real moral outrage and makes my blood boil!

posted by Brooke @ 4:20 PM