Got the hi grandpa scam call 'this is your grandson"

I wont repeat what I told the ##$%^^#@ on the other end of the line. Sadly seniors do fall for this .Basically its supposedly your grandson jammed up somewhere and you have to wire him money.

 

Unless he was born in Vietnam, I don't have any grandkids.

 

this scam and the IRS scam both work well. Another one is the family member was involved in an accident scam

Don't send anyone any money without verification.

 

A had a cousin who fell for this and a old lady living alone. Fuck those people.

Even worse (a little) after my wife's grandma died we got a call. The gma died in AZ but had burial and funeral here.

A day or so after the funeral we got a call saying that there was a problem with the headstone and they needed a CC number or it would not be fixed. We called cemetery and they stated that people will go through obits and call people to take advantage of their grieving.

People blow.

 

We've had to wrestle the cards, license and checkbook from a few elderly family members over the years. It's never easy but it has to happen. I'm thinking that as successive generations age, not having come from the time when most folks were actually honest and nice, this kind of stuff will abate.

Frankly, I don't know why people answer the phone blindly. OK, OK, maybe there are a few rotary dinosaurs out there, but there is no law or even religious mandate that says you have to answer every call. It's amazing that people do.

 

Two days ago I received a call from someone saying they where will CRA ( Canada Revenue Agency) and that I was suspected of Fraud, and If I called and paid by cc they would drop charges and call off the RCMP that where on their way to my house to arrest me.

I ran the phone# on google and that showed many complaints about the same thing from that number.

 

A sad fact is many elderly people are lonely and desperate for human contact...........to them a phone call from someone they know or love is very important, and many don't bother to check the call display, if they have it...........

 

Had this happen to me as well. They said my daughter owed three years of taxes or she would be going to jail. All I had to do was give them credit card to clear this whole mess up. Told them I do not use credit cards and why don't they come in person to collect cash. Needless to say they never showed

 

I sometimes answer stuff that I know is crap because I fill out contest forms using made up names and I like to see who they sell or give my number to. Yes I am bored sometimes.

 

I received one of those calls also a few weeks ago:

Caller: Hi Grandma, how are you?
Me: Fine, how are you?
Caller: Well I have a cold, but I need your help.
Me: This is a scam.
Caller hangs up.

I actually wish I had played along with it for a while - could have been a more interesting story to tell.

 

Greetings to all of you my friends!

i am a Nigerian prince who could use your help. If you could just provide your credit card number...

Bastards should be drawn and quartered

 

I never pick up my home phone anymore. I have an answering machine and let it go to that. With a land line I get too many calls from charitable organizations (they aren't on the do not call list), political people, esp this year and from the scammers. I keep getting one from the IRS saying that I owe them money and they will come and get me if I don't pay back taxes. Might be more believable (yeah, right) if the guy's accent didn't sound like he was from Nigeria.

Same thing with my cel phone, if I don't know who the number is from I won't answer it and let it go to voice mail.


Ken, I wish that I could wrestle the checkbook from my mother (she is 85) but she won't allow it. Actually she wants me to start paying her bills but out of my own pocket. Her thinking is that she raised us so we should be taking care of her and paying her bills. Never mind that after my dad died she inherited the family house (worth more than $700k which she rents out for $3500 a month) and 3 condos which brings in $1000 - $1500 a month each for her. After taxes she makes more than I do but she expects the kids to pay her bills even though she hasn't given us much money since we graduated high school. I don't know, maybe she wants to take it with her when she goes? She doesn't have any charge cards (luckily) but that means that I usually end up paying for stuff since she doesn't have money and she seems to forget to pay me back a lot. I'm only being nice to her because she has all the money from my dad (I only inherited a condo with a bigger mortgage than the place was worth when he passed away) and I don't want her to donate or give dad's money and investments to someone else. After my dad passed away one of my relatives befriended her (since they live on maui and I live in Honolulu) and she was giving him a lot of money, probably at least $50k a year (for 7 years) for doing very little (he was watering her plants once a week).


Last week I got a call from my cc company. They noticed a number of out of state charges and wanted to check if it was me making the charges. It wasn't. But I made them go back on my past month's charges to see if I had some other false charges, which I did. They backed out the fake charges and cancelled my cc number and reissued a new card with a new number. I checked my charges for the last month, 1 for Hawaiian air, 1 for MSS, a couple from Longs/CVS and 1 for the El Cortez. We are thinking that stolen number probably came from the El Cortez since they seem the most shadiest of the bunch but I'm not sure where my number was stolen.

 

Years ago, someone sold my mother an extended warranty on her 1996 Crown Vic, at the time it had about 25,000 miles and was around 6 years old. I think it still had the original tires. She was a widow living alone and I picked it up after going through her checkbook to get her tax return ready. It was a scam and very high cost relative to what was covered, I was able to cancel it immediately.

 

Very true... , my 80 y.o. mother lives 4 hours away, Dad died 3 years ago. I text her daily (though she's now starting to forget to check it... computer/e-mail's out of the question) and call her a couple times a week. Every time I call her now, she tells me of some phone call she's received or something that came in the mail that states, "act now... or else..." Pretty sure I'm on "borrowed-time" with having her put in an assisted living center, but she loves her home.

 

Mom is pretty dang smart & still young enough (71) to be paying close attention to what is going on in the world around her.

She gets a good chuckle out of the ones that are as follows:

They- This is Microsoft - we are calling to tell you that your computer has a virus. We need to have access to your computer to fix it.
She - I don't have a computer (she doesn't - she uses mine when she uses one)
They - Yes you do
She - No I don't.
Needless to say this goes back & forth a few times until she hangs up on them.

One time she told them 'well maybe it's my daughters computer I was using that has the virus. You can call her at the bank at ###-###-####.' That gets an immediate hang up lol.

I have had co-workers who have had the 'This is your grandson & I need money' ploy happen with their parents. Luckily they managed to not fall for it.

 

My Dad got a call a couple of weeks ago from his "Grandson". Seems like he was in an accident and needed some money. My Dad asked him if he had called me, to which he replied, no. "Well you better give him a call then, and don't bother me" and then hung up. He's 94 years old but still sharp as a tack..he knew it was a scam from the get go.

 

I got an email from my hisband's uncle saying he was stuck in Thailand and needed money from home. I laughed because this man is a successful businessman and would never email me for money. Apparently everyone in his contact list received the email.

 

I got one the other day that I can't figure out. She said she was calling from some security monitoring service and wanted to talk to me about all of the false alarms that are occurring in our neighborhood. I then asked what company they were. She just kept repeating her first name and that she was calling about all of the recent false alarms in the neighborhood. I kept insisting on the name of the company and she hung up!

The only thing I can think of is it was somebody trying to see if we had a security alarm system or not, which I'm not going to tell to a cold caller.

Anybody know? Anybody else had this one?

Now about 20 years ago my late aunt (MSRIP) got suckered into one of those "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up" machines even though her senior apartment at the time already had a panic alarm. She just agreed to it over the phone and did not realize she could not use it. It was a major hassle to get it cancelled and the charge reversed. Fortunately we have two attorneys in the family and they were able to get things straightened out, but I'm sure many seniors (I'm approaching that now - approaching? Some say I've reached it!) fall for scams like that!

 

actually some of the biggest scams happen at the care homes.

My mom is staying at a care home. Her 50" TV went on the fritz early last year. People working there (supposedly tech people) said that her 3 year old tv (cost $900) was broken and she needed to get another tv. They would dump her tv for her but mom wanted to get a new tv first. I helped her pick up a new tv. We brought the tv home and I checked out her old tv before I installed the new one. Appears she changed the settings on the old tv, it was going to the wrong input so she wasn't getting any signal. I fixed her input and the tv was working fine. I told her that maybe the workers were scamming her so you would give them your old tv. I seriously doubt that they would be so inept that they wouldn't know that the tv was using the wrong input jack. She said that they appeared to be fidding with the tv and they couldn't get it to work (I must be a genius because it took all of 3 minutes to figure out the problem). I told her that she should have me check things out before she bought a new item, just in case.

At the end of this past year her tv again started to give her problems. These guys are smart, this time the workers convinced her to take the TV off her hands so I couldn't examine the TV. I told her to call me first but she said the guys were so nice to check out the tv and take it off her hands (yeah, right, so generous to help scam the elderly). We had to go buy another tv and I installed it for her. When I was putting the TV manual away I found the manual for her old TV. I also found her receipt for the old tv. She had purchased a 5 year warranty on the TV so the tv was still under warranty but no good since the workers "dumped" the tv.

Last week the care home had a power outage and now her TV wasn't working that good. Her signal was weak and there was a high pitched sound when it is on. They workers again checked out the tv and said that her tv was broken and they would again take it off her hands but because the tv was less than 4 months old she didn't want to go out and purchase a new tv so she called me. I checked out the tv and ran a dvd on it (I previously bought her a dvd player even though she never uses it - but she wanted one because they had a lot of dvd's for the seniors to borrow) and it worked fine. I unplugged the cable box and checked the wires and plugged the cable line back in. After the box reset itself the tv and cable started working fine. There was still the high pitched sound so I called the cable company. They said that the problem was probably because the box shorted when the power went off so they would mail a new box to her.

Bugs me that even at care homes people try to scam the elderly, even the workers there.

 

My dad is 78 years old and he received the "Hi Grandpa" I need money as your grandson phone call. We are immigrants and we never use the term "grandpa" in our family so his danger antenna flashed. So no traction on that scam but it pisses me off that people are taking advantage of old people.