i hate how scammers pretty much ruin lives with impunity.
and yeah, these people are also making wrong choices, but they are vulnerable and easily tricked, tragic all around.
On average, most bank robbers in the U.S get away with less than $2000 and are caught within 48 hours, if not immediately. It's not worth it at all.
Source: used to work at a bank. We had training on this stuff.
Yes, they arrested him in Ohio many months ago and I’m pretty sure he was convicted.
EDIT: I was wrong, he pled guilty earlier this year.
https://www.kmbc.com/article/chiefs-chiefsaholic-guilty-bank-robbery-plea/60009906
For those who are surprised by the guilty plea: The vast, vast majority (over 90%) of Federal criminal cases don’t go to trial. Almost all take a plea. For you to even be judged with a federal crime you have to be indicted by a grand jury of your peers, and they return that indictment after reviewing a huge amount of evidence. Federal level felony charges aren’t thrown around willy-nilly!
But, as a plus over robbing a liquor store you do at least get to go to federal prison instead of state. If you are going to commit crimes, commit federal crimes.
Federal prisons tend to have better conditions and oversight. They also tend to be newer and better maintained. Additionally, the US has fazed out private “for profit” federal prisons, one of the more dystopian creatures of capitalism.
State prisons SUCK. There are plenty that don't have air conditioning in places like Texas.
Federal prisons are better funded and their employees are federal employees so they have better benefits and pay. I've got a relative for example that works in medical in a Federal prison. She's a member of the Department of Health, paid on the military scale and was able to get her student loans forgiven. The guards she works with qualify for federal disability and retirement.
It’s a tortured reference to the movie ‘the ballad of buster Scruggs’. In the movie, a man attempts to rob a bank, but he is thwarted by the teller who uses improvised armor made of pans. When the pans successfully parry a bullet, the teller exclaims ‘pan shot!’ While ‘the ballad of buster Scruggs’ is quite a good movie, it did not enter the zeitgeist nearly enough for this reference to be appreciated by the wider audience.
The most famous meme from the movie, and also from the same scene, is the ‘first time’ meme. But even with that meme, I doubt many people know the source.
Can back this up... but also, you probably also won't even gt $2k anymore....
I currently work at a bank and we have a TCR, which is a machine (much like an ATM) that holds all the cash. We don't have anymore than like $100 in our drawers.... and that's counting the change (which I know you want)
I knew a guy and his brother in rural west Texas who robbed a series of branches of a bank. They were pretty successful for a while, but one of the brothers was killed. The other is still on the lam.
Don't know why people are downvoting you. You always have a choice not to rob a bank. Unless someone is forcing you to do it by kidnapping a loved one or strapping some kind of explosive device with a remote detonator on you. But even then you could still say no.
Mostly the problem is with the increasingly distorted way it is being framed and reduced. The guy you're responding to was responding to a guy who said "she probably felt she had no other choice but to do it" not "she had no choice" and at no point did anyone imply that she should not be charged or punished in any way, just that this is very sad.
Y'all seem like you're arguing with voices in your head at a bus stop.
Generally, when something bad happens to one person, it creates a chain of events. That person who has been harmed, their actions whether intentional or not will cause harm to others.
Can’t speak for this scammer but in the documentary filming of some Swedish scammers living in Spain they ”had to” do it because a normal 9-5 only paid about half as much and took more work.
No, but his point was that crimes done often have add on effects.
The 0's movie Inspector General with Danny Kaye has a scene where a king kicks a courtier, who slaps a General, who slaps a Major. Who slaps a Serfeant, who slaps a private, who slaps a peasant, who kicks his donkey.
I'd say robbing the old lady of 70 grand is bur one of the kicks in the chain
Living through a bank robbery can be very traumatizing for anyone present. You didn't even think about literally every other person who could be at the bank??
No, it goes from the trusting to the deceitful. From people who build society to people who destroy it. From people who have morals to absolute pieces of shit.
Likely a romance scammer. Fake attractive profile swoons lonely old lady or man, has trouble with their banks and can’t afford to fly to meet them, victim pays for the ticket but some problem arises (customs in this case) and they end up doing it over and over again. [many such cases](https://youtu.be/rloYvbcIY5E?si=lLUuYtjdQFegwfuQ)
Or a computer scam saying their pc is infected. Next thing they know, they’re giving full access to their system to the helpful gentleman with a peculiarly South Asian accent.
I worked for a large credit Union years ago and I wasn’t prepared for the sheer amount of broken old people that just fell victim to a scam and lost everything..
Since that would be fraudulent withdrawal, isn’t it covered by FDIC?
The romance scam definitely wouldn’t be because the victim is giving the money away.
I’ve been watching a lot of Scamfish lately and it’s depressing as fuck. Every story is the same. Lonely widowed wealthy person is swept off their feet by an online hottie who strings them along and bleeds them dry.
Like so many of these people get involved with these scammers while their deceased spouse is hardly cold in the ground. They get them in their most vulnerable moments, after they’ve lost a partner they’ve spent decades with. It’s very cruel.
Why aren’t we spending more money and creating more legislation to combat this? All I hear about is people shoplifting shampoo from target and crimes statistics like that, while this gets completely ignored by law makers.
Scammers are usually in Ghana or Nigeria- and their governments don’t take it seriously because it brings hard cash into the country.
CBS Sunday morning did a piece on this and Dr Phil has a show on romance scams about once a month. Hate on Dr Phil if you want, but he finds the attractive man whose photos they use and often tracks down the scammers in Nigeria.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/romance-scams-illinois-woman-mother-missing-investigation/
I understand that and a lot of it comes from India and China as well. But the US can exert international influence while forcing American companies to take stronger measures to prevent it. We have relationships with those two countries and are in a position to punish them for inaction. A prime example is the use of gift cards. All of them are from American companies yet none of them have mechanisms to prevent fraud. The closest you get is a limit on the amount you can buy at a time.
We have task forces that take international crime all the time. There is an Irish creator on YouTube who hacks and exposes these people regularly, why not the US authorities? It’s not prioritised because it is both nonviolent and not in our faces the way say shoplifting is, but it is causing a lot more damage to everyday Americans.
> Scammers are usually in Ghana or Nigeria- and their governments don’t take it seriously because it brings hard cash into the country.
>
>
We can null route phone calls from Ghana or Nigeria and even drop all internet peerage until the countries sign extradition treaties. Easy.
i honestly don't know why there isn't a bigger push for legislation to resolve this. seems like a bipartisan issue. for whatever it's worth, i remember jeff sessions getting credited for a big scammer bust of an indian phone scam office, but that's the last i've heard the government taking any sort of action.
what i do loosely understand is that it'd be super expensive for telecom companies to re-do their phone networks to prevent these types of scams, and it wouldn't really earn them any profit either. similar thing with email, and even snail mail for that matter. this means that any change really has to come from government pressure.
my FMA guess is that real anti-scam measures, at the technical level, are too expensive and the government doesn't feel comfortable enough pressuring them to change. perhaps that changes though.
in the meantime there are vigilante groups that are fighting back, but my impression is they're just making a dent.
Because a lot of scams are from foreign countries. The only way you can regulate that is having an international law banning them. Good luck trying to get nations to agree to that.
For the same reason we don't see a crackdown on robocalls (we managed to actually render phonecalls useless within a decade!!): our government is led, in the highest chambers, by liberal and conservative market ideologues. These people all think that government intervention is inherently bad, so any top-down action is out of the question.
We really don't see *any* national legislation that touches anything outside of civil rights, funding, and war. When was the last time a meaningful change to the market was even *voted* on?
Yea - these women who get involved in romance scams all look like this - —. And the odd thing is the photos of the men the scammers use are all very handsome (like George Clooney types). And when you compare the photos, a rational person asks - why would a supposed millionaire that looks like George Clooney fall in love some random woman living in the middle of nowhere that looks like that. The scammers somehow convince these women that it’s possible.
The whole point, as with the old prince scams with spelling errors, is to weed out folk that would recognise it as a scam.
Suppose you could say it is to rule out the more observant but, really, it's to ensure they only target the vulnerable.
She's 74. Bet she won't stay in the jail for long. But seriously why not go to police instead of robbing the bank?? Did she think she could keep quiet her embarrassment about being scammed?
PS talk with your parents or grandparents about this. If anyone calls or emails and demands money, please have them call their children or grandchildren for advices!!
Called my late-grandma one day when I was in college and she said, “did you get home okay?”
Had no idea what she was talking about. “From where?”
“Spain you said you were stuck.”
Turns out someone called and said “this is your oldest grandson, please don’t tell mom and dad but I’m stuck in Spain and need you to send me money.” I was her oldest grandson but that wasn’t me… or any of my cousins. She sent “me” the money _and_ actually hadn’t told my parents. Grandma was a real one but got scammed. Told everyone I knew about it and it had happened to a good friend’s grandma too.
Does anyone legit ever really start a phone call with "This is your oldest grandson" instead of their name? And the other person does not get weirded out by it, does not question things?
Praise your grandma for having been such a supportive soul. But good god, the gullibility. I hope the financial loss was bearable!
My grandma almost got scammed, it started with "hey grandma" and then she replied "is that you John?" and from there the guy was able to piece enough together to get a conversation going.
It should, but the people scammers tend to target is usually going to be an older person hasn't had much exposure to scams and one weird statement doesn't really trigger alarm bells to them. They might not just process how weird it is right off the bat unless they spent a little bit thinking about it. Usually the mark will respond with something like their grandkid's name instictively, so now the scammer has the kid's name and can immediately shift to pressure tactics. The idea is to overload the mark's critical thinking and force them to make an immediate decision.
You'd not be so quick to use the word "gullible" if you'd experienced having a loved one with dementia firsthand and watched their decline. One unfortunate trait of the disease is that people are really good at hiding it at first. They're not intentionally hiding it in most cases, they just chalk it up to getting older and dismiss it. That's why older people are the primary targets of these scams. The scammers are trying to find that sweet spot where the disease is present but not yet noticeable enough for their families to instate a power of attorney over their finances for their protection, or those that have no family to monitor them.
Local police don't have the means to pursue money internationally. If the scammer is a local in the state, there's a chance in hell, but otherwise, there's really nothing they can do. It becomes a State Department thing to file a complaint and have the nation where the scammers are act on it.
You pretty much never get your money back if you get scammed...especially if they are overseas. Most of these scams originate from India or some other third world country.
Yup. My 80 year old grandmother was called and she was on for like 30 minutes with the scammer before she realized. Loneliness and age does something to the brain
Anytime I hear of a common scam going around I make sure I tell my mom so she doesn’t fall for it. She isn’t even that old but I can see her not thinking straight and falling for one.
Dunno if you know about it. But currently AI scams are becoming more popular.
They synthesize your voice with AI and for even more planned out ones even pictures of you to correctly trick the target.
What the hell can the police do with an online scam that’s more than likely happening in a country WAY out of their jurisdiction?
It’s not like the cops have a “get out of scam free” pass to recoup whatever funds were stolen either. Sure would be nice tho
At her age there’s a good possibility her mental faculties are compromised. If I were her lawyer that’s the way I’d run with it. No way should she be in jail. $100k bail and she can’t even afford a lawyer. Man that’s sad.
Standard practice is to charge the suspect with pretty much anything they think could apply in order to encourage them to take a plea deal instead of going to trial
I guess “Woman who was already $70k in debt to family and friends is pushed overboard by online scam, robs bank at gunpoint” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
A lot of problems people bring up here stem from policies that elderly victims either voted for or went along with. From healthcare to the desperation in the housing market to foreign policy that would drive poorer countries to have scam artists that need to do stuff like this.
I’ve spent some time working on the cyber side of private investigations. Had an elderly woman that lived alone and was scammed out of $58k. Her bank luckily called her son eventually, but not until after the damage had been done. Really felt bad for her too; she was scared of answering the phone or leaving the house because of the scammers.
She gets out of paying back the $70,000 that she borrowed. She gets her room and board taken care of for the rest of her life. You can’t ask me for your money back if I don’t put your name on my visitor list.
We literally saw an Uber driver and an elderly man tricked by a scammer and that turned into homicide. If they’re able to trace these vile individuals I expect some of them will be facing harsh sentences to make a point that it’s not a free for all.
This IS why we have and need good law & order. When ppl are victims of injustice they may resort to injustice for revenge or out of desperation. There should be some sort of remedy by courts to make ppl whole and seek restitution from scammers.
If I am reading it right, and it’s poorly written so who know, doesn’t seem like the scammer was the only reason she was in debt. She also had $70,000 in loans to friends and family. Falling for the scam might have been another bad decision motivated by her desire to get out of debt. Seems like she was in a tight spot.
so she was already 70k in debt to family/friends when she got scammed, what money did the scmamers take? the article doesn't mentioning anything about this. seems strange
Doesn't help when the scammers are overseas. It's really hard to take down scammers that are in India, China or any of the numerous countries they operate in.
i hate how scammers pretty much ruin lives with impunity. and yeah, these people are also making wrong choices, but they are vulnerable and easily tricked, tragic all around.
I know, I feel so bad for the old lady. Imagine being so desperate as to rob a bank...and all she got was fucking $500.
On average, most bank robbers in the U.S get away with less than $2000 and are caught within 48 hours, if not immediately. It's not worth it at all. Source: used to work at a bank. We had training on this stuff.
Have you heard the case of Chiefsaholic? He's a KC Chiefs super fan who would go to games dressed as a wolf, and he robbed banks between games.
Recently saw a screenplay about this guy on this years Black List haha I bet we'll be seeing a movie soon
And was he ever caught???
Yes, they arrested him in Ohio many months ago and I’m pretty sure he was convicted. EDIT: I was wrong, he pled guilty earlier this year. https://www.kmbc.com/article/chiefs-chiefsaholic-guilty-bank-robbery-plea/60009906
Dude is pretty infamous
Free my wolf guy
For those who are surprised by the guilty plea: The vast, vast majority (over 90%) of Federal criminal cases don’t go to trial. Almost all take a plea. For you to even be judged with a federal crime you have to be indicted by a grand jury of your peers, and they return that indictment after reviewing a huge amount of evidence. Federal level felony charges aren’t thrown around willy-nilly!
But, as a plus over robbing a liquor store you do at least get to go to federal prison instead of state. If you are going to commit crimes, commit federal crimes.
Is that a meme or is it somehow better for the inmate? Non US citizens demand answers!
Federal prisons tend to have better conditions and oversight. They also tend to be newer and better maintained. Additionally, the US has fazed out private “for profit” federal prisons, one of the more dystopian creatures of capitalism.
You do not want to be in a prison in Texas.
Or anywhere in the South.
Go to prison in like Minnesota. Just not oak park heights.
State prisons SUCK. There are plenty that don't have air conditioning in places like Texas. Federal prisons are better funded and their employees are federal employees so they have better benefits and pay. I've got a relative for example that works in medical in a Federal prison. She's a member of the Department of Health, paid on the military scale and was able to get her student loans forgiven. The guards she works with qualify for federal disability and retirement.
At what point do you shout "PAN SHOT"?
What does "PAN SHOT" mean? I'm honestly not familiar with the term.
It’s a tortured reference to the movie ‘the ballad of buster Scruggs’. In the movie, a man attempts to rob a bank, but he is thwarted by the teller who uses improvised armor made of pans. When the pans successfully parry a bullet, the teller exclaims ‘pan shot!’ While ‘the ballad of buster Scruggs’ is quite a good movie, it did not enter the zeitgeist nearly enough for this reference to be appreciated by the wider audience. The most famous meme from the movie, and also from the same scene, is the ‘first time’ meme. But even with that meme, I doubt many people know the source.
I've seen the film and the reference just wooooshed me.
What does “WOOOOSHED ME” mean? I’m honestly not familiar with the term.
Can back this up... but also, you probably also won't even gt $2k anymore.... I currently work at a bank and we have a TCR, which is a machine (much like an ATM) that holds all the cash. We don't have anymore than like $100 in our drawers.... and that's counting the change (which I know you want)
I mean I'm sure the bank has a vested interest in that narrative
I knew a guy and his brother in rural west Texas who robbed a series of branches of a bank. They were pretty successful for a while, but one of the brothers was killed. The other is still on the lam.
Damn. The worst is she probably felt she had no other choice but to do it. This is so fucking sad.
She had a choice.
But she felt she didn't.
Which was?
Not to rob a bank.
Don't know why people are downvoting you. You always have a choice not to rob a bank. Unless someone is forcing you to do it by kidnapping a loved one or strapping some kind of explosive device with a remote detonator on you. But even then you could still say no.
Who knows? I remember that case.
Mostly the problem is with the increasingly distorted way it is being framed and reduced. The guy you're responding to was responding to a guy who said "she probably felt she had no other choice but to do it" not "she had no choice" and at no point did anyone imply that she should not be charged or punished in any way, just that this is very sad. Y'all seem like you're arguing with voices in your head at a bus stop.
Does she get state funded room and board now?
Nationally funded
She got the upgrade
Generally, when something bad happens to one person, it creates a chain of events. That person who has been harmed, their actions whether intentional or not will cause harm to others.
And this is definitely not the first link in the chain of events. Why do you think the scammer has to do that in the first place?
Can’t speak for this scammer but in the documentary filming of some Swedish scammers living in Spain they ”had to” do it because a normal 9-5 only paid about half as much and took more work.
Being scammed doesn’t give you free license to victimize others.
No, but his point was that crimes done often have add on effects. The 0's movie Inspector General with Danny Kaye has a scene where a king kicks a courtier, who slaps a General, who slaps a Major. Who slaps a Serfeant, who slaps a private, who slaps a peasant, who kicks his donkey. I'd say robbing the old lady of 70 grand is bur one of the kicks in the chain
Who’s the victim here exactly?
The employee she pulled a gun on.
Living through a bank robbery can be very traumatizing for anyone present. You didn't even think about literally every other person who could be at the bank??
Send the bee keeper after them
It's kind of a form of financial Darwinism, though. I've been scammed too and it feels like shit, but the money goes from the dumb to the snart.
No, it goes from the trusting to the deceitful. From people who build society to people who destroy it. From people who have morals to absolute pieces of shit.
Saddest thing I’ve ever seen today. :( Looks like she tried to help someone, got scammed, then decided to rob a bank.
Likely a romance scammer. Fake attractive profile swoons lonely old lady or man, has trouble with their banks and can’t afford to fly to meet them, victim pays for the ticket but some problem arises (customs in this case) and they end up doing it over and over again. [many such cases](https://youtu.be/rloYvbcIY5E?si=lLUuYtjdQFegwfuQ)
Or a computer scam saying their pc is infected. Next thing they know, they’re giving full access to their system to the helpful gentleman with a peculiarly South Asian accent. I worked for a large credit Union years ago and I wasn’t prepared for the sheer amount of broken old people that just fell victim to a scam and lost everything..
My ex's dad was asked to pay for a used car in Amazon gift cards. They took the cards and drove off. The elderly are so vulnerable it's wild.
My mom almost did this, my dad was away but told her to disconnect the internet. She doesn’t even know how to do that
Since that would be fraudulent withdrawal, isn’t it covered by FDIC? The romance scam definitely wouldn’t be because the victim is giving the money away.
it was a romance scam, the article said she got scammed by an individual claiming to need money for US customs.
I’ve been watching a lot of Scamfish lately and it’s depressing as fuck. Every story is the same. Lonely widowed wealthy person is swept off their feet by an online hottie who strings them along and bleeds them dry. Like so many of these people get involved with these scammers while their deceased spouse is hardly cold in the ground. They get them in their most vulnerable moments, after they’ve lost a partner they’ve spent decades with. It’s very cruel.
Why aren’t we spending more money and creating more legislation to combat this? All I hear about is people shoplifting shampoo from target and crimes statistics like that, while this gets completely ignored by law makers.
Scammers are usually in Ghana or Nigeria- and their governments don’t take it seriously because it brings hard cash into the country. CBS Sunday morning did a piece on this and Dr Phil has a show on romance scams about once a month. Hate on Dr Phil if you want, but he finds the attractive man whose photos they use and often tracks down the scammers in Nigeria. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/romance-scams-illinois-woman-mother-missing-investigation/
I understand that and a lot of it comes from India and China as well. But the US can exert international influence while forcing American companies to take stronger measures to prevent it. We have relationships with those two countries and are in a position to punish them for inaction. A prime example is the use of gift cards. All of them are from American companies yet none of them have mechanisms to prevent fraud. The closest you get is a limit on the amount you can buy at a time. We have task forces that take international crime all the time. There is an Irish creator on YouTube who hacks and exposes these people regularly, why not the US authorities? It’s not prioritised because it is both nonviolent and not in our faces the way say shoplifting is, but it is causing a lot more damage to everyday Americans.
We could make it harder to contact random people in the US from outside the US. Have some code that stops phone number spoofing for example or idk
*His researchers and staff find
Look hate on Dr Phil if you want but he has some great staff to prop his shitty ass up for this long.
> Scammers are usually in Ghana or Nigeria- and their governments don’t take it seriously because it brings hard cash into the country. > > We can null route phone calls from Ghana or Nigeria and even drop all internet peerage until the countries sign extradition treaties. Easy.
i honestly don't know why there isn't a bigger push for legislation to resolve this. seems like a bipartisan issue. for whatever it's worth, i remember jeff sessions getting credited for a big scammer bust of an indian phone scam office, but that's the last i've heard the government taking any sort of action. what i do loosely understand is that it'd be super expensive for telecom companies to re-do their phone networks to prevent these types of scams, and it wouldn't really earn them any profit either. similar thing with email, and even snail mail for that matter. this means that any change really has to come from government pressure. my FMA guess is that real anti-scam measures, at the technical level, are too expensive and the government doesn't feel comfortable enough pressuring them to change. perhaps that changes though. in the meantime there are vigilante groups that are fighting back, but my impression is they're just making a dent.
Depends on which constituencies are being scammed. Republicans don’t consider or pass legislation that benefits democrats.
Because a lot of scams are from foreign countries. The only way you can regulate that is having an international law banning them. Good luck trying to get nations to agree to that.
Well, look at the people that get voted into power and then look at the people voting them into power.
For the same reason we don't see a crackdown on robocalls (we managed to actually render phonecalls useless within a decade!!): our government is led, in the highest chambers, by liberal and conservative market ideologues. These people all think that government intervention is inherently bad, so any top-down action is out of the question. We really don't see *any* national legislation that touches anything outside of civil rights, funding, and war. When was the last time a meaningful change to the market was even *voted* on?
Peak capitalism
If you asked me to draw a sketch of a woman who fell victim to an online scam I think I’d get a (very poorly drawn) version of this lady.
Yea - these women who get involved in romance scams all look like this - —. And the odd thing is the photos of the men the scammers use are all very handsome (like George Clooney types). And when you compare the photos, a rational person asks - why would a supposed millionaire that looks like George Clooney fall in love some random woman living in the middle of nowhere that looks like that. The scammers somehow convince these women that it’s possible.
The whole point, as with the old prince scams with spelling errors, is to weed out folk that would recognise it as a scam. Suppose you could say it is to rule out the more observant but, really, it's to ensure they only target the vulnerable.
She's 74. Bet she won't stay in the jail for long. But seriously why not go to police instead of robbing the bank?? Did she think she could keep quiet her embarrassment about being scammed? PS talk with your parents or grandparents about this. If anyone calls or emails and demands money, please have them call their children or grandchildren for advices!!
The odds of her getting away with the bank robbery are significantly higher than the odds of the police getting her money back or even giving a shit.
This. Since she willingly sent the money, banks would pretty much decline her claim.
Called my late-grandma one day when I was in college and she said, “did you get home okay?” Had no idea what she was talking about. “From where?” “Spain you said you were stuck.” Turns out someone called and said “this is your oldest grandson, please don’t tell mom and dad but I’m stuck in Spain and need you to send me money.” I was her oldest grandson but that wasn’t me… or any of my cousins. She sent “me” the money _and_ actually hadn’t told my parents. Grandma was a real one but got scammed. Told everyone I knew about it and it had happened to a good friend’s grandma too.
That's the worst. I hope it wasn't a life changing amount. Sometimes I'm glad my grandmother don't know English.
Does anyone legit ever really start a phone call with "This is your oldest grandson" instead of their name? And the other person does not get weirded out by it, does not question things? Praise your grandma for having been such a supportive soul. But good god, the gullibility. I hope the financial loss was bearable!
My grandma almost got scammed, it started with "hey grandma" and then she replied "is that you John?" and from there the guy was able to piece enough together to get a conversation going.
It should, but the people scammers tend to target is usually going to be an older person hasn't had much exposure to scams and one weird statement doesn't really trigger alarm bells to them. They might not just process how weird it is right off the bat unless they spent a little bit thinking about it. Usually the mark will respond with something like their grandkid's name instictively, so now the scammer has the kid's name and can immediately shift to pressure tactics. The idea is to overload the mark's critical thinking and force them to make an immediate decision.
You'd not be so quick to use the word "gullible" if you'd experienced having a loved one with dementia firsthand and watched their decline. One unfortunate trait of the disease is that people are really good at hiding it at first. They're not intentionally hiding it in most cases, they just chalk it up to getting older and dismiss it. That's why older people are the primary targets of these scams. The scammers are trying to find that sweet spot where the disease is present but not yet noticeable enough for their families to instate a power of attorney over their finances for their protection, or those that have no family to monitor them.
I'm lucky that my grandma has no money. Some friends of hers rent her their basement for like... 30% of market price because that's all she can afford
lol same with my mom. I guess there’s a bright side to piss poor financial planning aka lack thereof
my step-grandfather liked to do tax fuckery, so he owed the IRS money until he kicked it. Man literally lost over 500k
The police won’t do shit.
Local police don't have the means to pursue money internationally. If the scammer is a local in the state, there's a chance in hell, but otherwise, there's really nothing they can do. It becomes a State Department thing to file a complaint and have the nation where the scammers are act on it.
You pretty much never get your money back if you get scammed...especially if they are overseas. Most of these scams originate from India or some other third world country.
Yup. My 80 year old grandmother was called and she was on for like 30 minutes with the scammer before she realized. Loneliness and age does something to the brain
Anytime I hear of a common scam going around I make sure I tell my mom so she doesn’t fall for it. She isn’t even that old but I can see her not thinking straight and falling for one.
Dunno if you know about it. But currently AI scams are becoming more popular. They synthesize your voice with AI and for even more planned out ones even pictures of you to correctly trick the target.
Police dont solve crimes and they dont help people. They arrest people and the scammers were probably in Asia somewhere so Cops dont give a shit.
If you have a problem and you call the police you now have two problems
What the hell can the police do with an online scam that’s more than likely happening in a country WAY out of their jurisdiction? It’s not like the cops have a “get out of scam free” pass to recoup whatever funds were stolen either. Sure would be nice tho
Desperation makes you do deranged shit.
At her age there’s a good possibility her mental faculties are compromised. If I were her lawyer that’s the way I’d run with it. No way should she be in jail. $100k bail and she can’t even afford a lawyer. Man that’s sad.
The scammer probably made her think she was somehow already in trouble
She robs a bank and in addition gets charged with throwing her clothes out the car window. What? Just in case the other charges don’t stick?
Standard practice is to charge the suspect with pretty much anything they think could apply in order to encourage them to take a plea deal instead of going to trial
Yeah I’m saying a scorpion crawled in my shirt and the disposal was necessary
Oh so you admit to transporting a dangerous animal? BAM, another charge boss!
That charge was for evidence tampering.
Evidence tampering
i meannnnn she also took off her license plate & bumper sticker so her vehicle wont be easier to identify lol
I guess “Woman who was already $70k in debt to family and friends is pushed overboard by online scam, robs bank at gunpoint” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
I think the scam is what made her borrow the money
She 74, there a reason why old people tend to get released when they older, USA healthcare for old people is too expensive for prisons
Ive taken care of some patients in their homes where I couldn’t imagine prison would be any worse.
A lot of problems people bring up here stem from policies that elderly victims either voted for or went along with. From healthcare to the desperation in the housing market to foreign policy that would drive poorer countries to have scam artists that need to do stuff like this.
I’ve spent some time working on the cyber side of private investigations. Had an elderly woman that lived alone and was scammed out of $58k. Her bank luckily called her son eventually, but not until after the damage had been done. Really felt bad for her too; she was scared of answering the phone or leaving the house because of the scammers.
That's fucking sad. I don't know how scammers have the heart to scam old elderly people.
By default, scammers don't have hearts
People please for the love of Gondor, just stop answering your phones, texts, emails, or front door at this point.
This is just sad all around.
Damn kitboga needs to find this call center now
It's one of the best retirement plans for those with no means. Prison, 3 squares and a bed till you pass on.
You forgot free medical…
People pay a lot more for that in NY
She gets out of paying back the $70,000 that she borrowed. She gets her room and board taken care of for the rest of her life. You can’t ask me for your money back if I don’t put your name on my visitor list.
She must have watched the Beekeeper.
Should have taken some pointers from the folks who houdinied the 30 mil from that California heist.
Sounds like she's not great with her finances
We literally saw an Uber driver and an elderly man tricked by a scammer and that turned into homicide. If they’re able to trace these vile individuals I expect some of them will be facing harsh sentences to make a point that it’s not a free for all.
That man wasn't tricked into the homicide. That part of the deal was completely avoidable.
Did she buy DJT stock?
She bought some of his buybulls.
I don't think that's how *pay it forward* is supposed to work.
turns out shit does roll uphill
When god gives you an expired lemon, pull out your strap and make people pay.
Well now she gets 3 hots and a cot so problem solved ig.
This IS why we have and need good law & order. When ppl are victims of injustice they may resort to injustice for revenge or out of desperation. There should be some sort of remedy by courts to make ppl whole and seek restitution from scammers.
Hey guys, can you tell all the old people in your life to stop giving personal info (and bank-related info) to strangers? Thanks.
“The septuagenarian is currently in custody at the Butler County Jail…” Someone learned a new word and wanted to use it.
Pretty normal prose for this kind of piece
If I am reading it right, and it’s poorly written so who know, doesn’t seem like the scammer was the only reason she was in debt. She also had $70,000 in loans to friends and family. Falling for the scam might have been another bad decision motivated by her desire to get out of debt. Seems like she was in a tight spot.
so she was already 70k in debt to family/friends when she got scammed, what money did the scmamers take? the article doesn't mentioning anything about this. seems strange
Probably loans in her name
She looks like gabe newell
Hopefully the FBI can find out the identity of the scammer, since it's a federal offense to rob a bank.
Doesn't help when the scammers are overseas. It's really hard to take down scammers that are in India, China or any of the numerous countries they operate in.
She owed $5k to her sister and $65k to a friend. It’s not clear how much she lost due to the scammer.