[Boomer]

And now I am going to add something else to worry about. I know 3 people who have been scammed.

One was a lot older but still seemed on top of things to everyone who knew her. But she had been sending money to a scammer to the tune of over 30,000 bucks. The bank caught it and got her to involve her daughter who had no idea. She thought her mom was doing fine.

The other two did not lose as much, but both of them are highly intelligent people, very involved with family and friends, and yet the scammers got them. Neither of them can believe they actually let it happen. I am glad they talked about it though because even though embarrassed, they gave the rest of us a good warning.

For one, a spouse caught it, and the other one caught herself. That one happened when she got aggravated trying to communicate with a robot online to solve a problem with an order or subscription or billing or whatever…..

She then stopped the pointless conversation with the robot and looked for a phone number, finally finding one online that looked perfectly legitimate. (insert the theme song from Dragnet here)

Anyway, the professional sounding scammer answering the bogus number played his helpful role quite well and got account numbers. It was a mess but she got it straightened out…..

Who knew that there were evil characters out there with bogus phone numbers and websites just waiting for us to call them.

I saw a speaker once who worked on fraud cases, and he said that highly intelligent people make up a surprising percentage of people who have been scammed. (One was a doctor who scammers got for over a hundred-thousand dollars.)

So there’s that.

Boomer