Kindest Regards, greymare!
we had a big exposay on the tv show 60 minutes a few months ago. people were just sending these criminals money and then whining about how now they have to sell their house etc just to get by. stupid. this man who had sent over over 30 000 dollars to this mob was still doing it because he couldnt believe that he didnt have the "millions" of dollars coming. fool
"There's a sucker born every minute." -P. T. Barnum
It never ceases to amaze me what some people will choose to believe. The internet is rife with charlatans and outright liars, yet "this is true, I heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from some guy halfway around the world...", so be sure to pass this chain message around and kick back a few bucks to the person who sent it to you... Dum Dee Dum.
The bad part is when elder folks are marked as targets. A great many of them are no longer in full mental capacity to figure these things out. The perpetrators know this, and that is why a lot of their efforts are aimed at older folks. Besides, older folks often have larger nest eggs to pull from.
So yeah, it is important that we watch carefully for ourselves and our families, but it is also important that we help oversee what our parents and grand-parents are getting themselves into. It can be a dicey situation...a lot of folks don't freely share information about their financial situation even with relatives and those who have their best interest at heart. Yet these same people often expose themselves to be fleeced by these con artists, and the experience of financial ruin is a very, very hard lesson to learn the hard way.
Personally, I just can't figure out how such con artists can sleep at night with their conscience. How can one rob an elderly person of their life savings and leave them destitute at such a vulnerable point in their lives and manage to justify it with anything other than raw greed? Even if I were destitute, and I have walked very close to that for a good portion of my life, I could never justify stealing
everything, least of all from a person who has no way to replace it. I have in the past justified taking what wouldn't be missed (and I have since concluded that even that is not "karmically" right). I cannot understand how someone can justify to themselves the taking of a person's livelihood, especially an elderly person.