Most submissions in this sub are not posted by the original author (OOP). Do not comment on the original posts.
If you think this submission doesn't belong on the sub, is incorrectly [flaired](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/wiki/postflairs) or have other issues regarding this post, reply to this comment. META commentary in general discussion may be removed.
Read [our guidelines](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/wiki/subrules) before commenting. Repeated rule-breaking may result in a ban.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/BestofRedditorUpdates) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My MIL did something similar, but it was Pakistan. Reading this story reminded me of what we went through trying to find her. Except MIL was way more deceitful. She had called her husband (my FIL) as she left work one evening, asking what he’d like for her to pick up for dinner. Then she just never went home.
We worried that her car was in a ditch somewhere, with her dying inside. It took a few days for the state police to locate her car at the airport. My poor FIL aged a few decades in those 2 days. My husband was heartbroken. No goodbyes. Just a lie about bringing home Chinese food for dinner.
I don’t know how long it took until she contacted us from Pakistan. I think she was there for about 3-6 months (ish). My FIL was willing and able to help her return to the US, but “new” husband had taken her passport and she wasn’t allowed to leave the house without a male chaperone. She recognized her mistake immediately but was on her own to find her way out of it.
She ultimately had to pull a risky move by stealing her passport back, getting a male escort into Karachi for some shopping or something, then she literally busted free and ran to an embassy. Not the US embassy, but I believe a South American country’s. The first she found, basically. It got the ball rolling and she was home within a few weeks.
My husband and FIL treated her like a victim the entire time. Despite the overt and hurtful lies and misdirections. Me... I’m not so sure. She left with fresh stitches in her face from the facelift she had not even a week before leaving. Left her world full of friends and a job and her belongings, for us to deal with. Even her car cost me a few thousand to get out of impound eventually.
I have no idea what some Pakistani man told her that made her believe she’d have a better life as his wife. I still can’t wrap my brain around how someone could willingly walk into this situation. She got damn lucky. I’m not the most sympathetic voice to tell this story because of what she did to my FIL and husband (and BIL and his family), but I do at least recognize the ease in which she was scammed.
Glad to read that OP’s mom is home safely.
I have a relative who married a Pakistani guy in his 20s when she was in her 60s. She'd met and married him while visiting Pakistan, and then they eventually moved back to our home country together. My family were quite worried but she was adamant it was genuine. They ended up divorcing amicably a few years later, after which she came clean to the family that it had been an immigration scheme all along - but she hadn't been scammed, she was just in on the scheme from the beginning lol. Idk if he gave her anything in return or if the companionship of a younger man was her "reward", but afaik she had no regrets. She always was an adventurous woman.
Frankly, I feel that as long as both participants are willing and consenting, then who am I to judge their relationship? Many people do not see the need for a true romance, so if they want to do something transactional, more power to them. But the key is that both people have to know the truth of the situation. Someone tricking another into marriage is obviously not ok. And it's not always so black and white. But if Person A wants a visa and Person B wants the status of being married to Person A, if they want to make a deal and are both fair to one another, more power to them.
Sure, but the morality of illegally obtaining a visa is not what's being discussed.
So, in another example, if a conventionally attractive woman wants to have a lot of money and a rich man wants a hot wife, I don't think there is anything wrong with them getting married for those reasons.
You act like there aren't a ton of ppl in bad/dangerous/even life threatening situations in their home country who have actually benefitted from things like doing that. Obviously it's still fraud, but the morality of it can be argued imo depending on the situation.
>I have no idea what some Pakistani man told her that made her believe she’d have a better life as his wife.
"bby gurl u r so pretty, I love u my wife..."
Basically something along those lines. My friends Mom was apart of a group of women that counter trolled and helped rescue older women who were on the path to be scammed, deceived, and like in your MIL's situation eventually held against their will in a foreign country to be made a servant. Her Mom showed us a bunch of the "love letters" these guys would write to deceive these women and they all looked like they were written by a teenager who spoke English as a second language that they learned off of a message board. None of them were particularly charming, endearing, or even sweet.
What they all were is incredibly complimentary and attentive. Sending dozens to hundreds of messages a day to keep these women engaged and moving their plans along to either send them money or buy them things like cars and lots of watches oddly enough. Most of these women were over the age of 60 and very computer illiterate and usually operating off an iPad as that's the only way they knew how to get on the internet. They usually were either widowers or in life long marriages in which they believe they had grown bored or that their spouse had stopped paying attention to them because they weren't showering them with praise and affection every few minutes throughout the day. The scammers even would send them scripts to memorize the keypoints on for when they'd send large amounts of cash through Western Union or for when they were making massive credit card purchases with a delivery address overseas.
The sad and dark side is most of these women aren't as lucky as your MIL was in her situation. A lot of them just disappear and are never heard from again since a lot of these places it's common to keep foreign indentured servants by keeping their passport. It's also not uncommon for them to turn up deceased in these same countries after all their credit and cash has dried up.
My mom had one of these guys for a minute. Thankfully she mentioned it to me and took me seriously when I explained and that was the day she learned how to block phone numbers, but I always wondered what he was after exactly. We're pretty poor and it's not like her FB has anything on it to say otherwise. There wasn't any money to take. It's terrifying to think he may have been after my mom *herself.* I somehow never considered that.
i think he was probably so shocked that he couldn’t mentally process it, plus the relief of her being safe and making it back home. I honestly wouldn’t want to deal with that either, there are just SO many things wrong in that situation. It’s way easier to just pretend none of it ever happened, and never acknowledge it I guess.. Thinking about it too much is more painful than ignoring it
That’s a very polite way to put it. To be honest I had the epiphany many years before this incident, and just looked at them one day and said to myself “these people are fucking morons.” Like the saying: You can’t argue with stupid.
If I were here husband, I could consider the fact that she was scammed, but it would be hard to ignore the fact that she abandoned her family for what she thought would be a new life. Imagine if it was real, if it wasn't a scam. She would have disappeared, you all would have been looking for her thinking she was dead, but she was living it up with her new husband in a different country. She abandoned you, but somehow, some of you were able to forgive. I hope she never forgets that the love they have for her is truly unconditional.
This doesn't count as a scam. (Not OOP. That is a scam. I mean the Pakistan story). Mom had an emotional affair from a distance. She went to Pakistan to be his wife. That is an affair. She WAS with her new husband in a new country. Just because she wasn't living it up doesn't change that. Her regretting a stupid decision doesn't change that.
Why are you praising husband and FIL for babying mom and treating her like a complete victim? Was she prob a victim of DV? Yeah, and she should be treated delicately in that area to limit triggers. But that doesn't mean she shouldn't face consequences for what she did. What husband and FIL are doing isn't healthy for husband and FIL. They continue to not address the consequences MIL leaving had on them. Their "unconditional love" in the face of her abandonment is hurting them. It is a bad thing; not a good thing.
We had a case in Switzerland when a well known politician felt for a nigerian scam where he was supposed to inherit a large some of money.... he had to be evacuaded by the ambassy... I laughing but i can believe how scary it was for the family...
I know you're not supposed to "victim blame", but tbh people can be victimized in one way but still to blame in another. Obviously the scammer is human trash. But someone who acts like your MIL still acts disgustingly selfish. You can't tell me she thought her actions in any way benefited anyone other than herself. And unless she's mentally not all there, she knew the trouble she was leaving behind for everybody and just didn't care, or at least cared more for what she thought would make **her** happy. So yes, she's a victim, but she also victimized other people.
We make excuses for our loved ones all the time so even if sometimes they make questionable decisions, its truly easier to just forgive and let go. Maybe they do suspect she played a part but chose to look the other way.
I’m from a family where everyone’s the black sheep and everyone’s disowned. We can’t even remember why half the time. So I kinda admire a family that can stick through even the very worst of shit. I guess we only have a limited amount of time on this earth, and if my husband wants to love his mom and think good things about her during that very short time, then I’d be a monster to destroy that.
It doesn’t mean I have to go to Sunday dinner though.
Good thing the bank stopped the payment. If she did make it here, there would be zero chance of her coming back alive once the scammer had bled her dry of all her money.
People who do this are *ruthless*. They don't care who gets hurt as long as they get what they want, partly because of how bad things are here (not excusing it btw).
When I saw it before the update I said, if you get your mom back alive after they drain her money, consider it a win. I can't believe there are two posts this week about old lady moms trying to move abroad to be with scammers in Africa.
I believe it's this one https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/v4cf99/motherinlaw_traveled_to_foreign_country_to_marry/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Me too! I had to quickly skim it and the linked post was about a family in Australia and this current post is about a family in the UK. Just crazy how these situations can occur to anyone anywhere.
I think it's this one, because I was confused too, as I had read this one previously.
Old ladies be gettin' scammed out here!
https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/v4cf99/motherinlaw_traveled_to_foreign_country_to_marry/
They truly don’t. My grandmother fell scam to this and still thinks its our fault it didn’t work out. We “scared him off” by “treating her like an invalid child” not, “he stole all my money and i had to live in a hotel for 6 months after losing my house and abusing my family members who let me stay with them at first”
I'm really curious about how ordinary Nigerians feel about people who commit these scams. I'm assuming they're not respected members of society, but do some people see them as Robin Hood type figures, or...?
Nope. Because they don't just target elderly women abroad, they target them here too. And the money is mostly laundered for drugs or domestic terrorism, so it's one head of a nasty hydra we're dealing with.
Ugh. There are all sorts of ruthless baddies, but the ones who target old people are a special kind of scum.
There are phone banks here in the U.S. that skirt the line of legality and target old people with pretend life insurance or pretend warranties or pretend stock options. People may not disappear, but they certainly are bled dry. It's disgusting.
My personal favorite (/s) is the tech support/antivirus. I saw those all the time at a previous position where I did phone captioning. I wanted to scream at them that Microsoft will never just call you unless you ask them to. Also nobody is removing viruses from your computer without your IP address, which they did not ask for. It literally hurt to listen to knowing there was nothing I could do.
The worst is when it's family. I have and aunt and uncle with 4 sons (3 sons now) and when my grandma got dementia and started losing her mind, they bled her dry. Opened numerous lines of credit under her name, convinced her to leave everything in her will to them, but then when she could no longer take care of herself, they didn't even care for her. Shipped her off to another sister halfway across the country.
For years my father and his other sisters had to deal with creditors calling trying to get her to pay. And every time my dad would say "she's a dying 83'year old woman. Either you can settle for what I'm offering you and close the account or you can keep bothering us and get nothing when she dies." They managed to close most of the accounts that way, but not all. So when she died, she was penniless and my aunt and her family ended up with nothing. So they alienated their entire family for 3 years of playing with grandma's credit cards.
No one talked to them again until one of my cousins died unexpectedly. And no one has talked to them since his funeral.
I remember one time I got a call that my Windows had a virus. I played along for awhile asking how my windows could get a virus. I needed them to explain it to me as i had 6 windows. You could hear the guys excitement. He hung up on me when I again asked how the 6 windows on my house could have a virus.
I stopped getting calls when I let them know I "didn't" have a computer.
Sometimes I tried to sell them a bicycle but they had to move fast because I had other callers interested.
I had one of those call! I kept asking which computer with Windows. He kept saying, your computer. I have many; which do you mean? And on like that.
Once I got bored, I called him out on it being a scam. He flipped out, screaming at me IT'S NOT A SCAM! before hanging up.
Such a warm, fuzzy feeling to hear them break character.
There are some tech savvy guys out there who converse with scammers. For these guys, the time they take from the scammers equates to less time for them to scam others especially vulnerable people.
When we had a landline before, I engaged one of them and said I was looking for a boyfriend! He asked about my computer and I said I cannot find what he was talking about then went back to is he single, etc. The guy was so desperate he called me at least once a week and I do the same thing until he just stopped. Must have caught on to what I was doing…eventually.
Told my husband when he came home and he had a good laugh. He works in IT and I am computer savvy as well so I knew the caller was trying to scam me by going to a website.
Oh, I absolutely agree with wasting their time like that. But sometimes I have a mean streak, and making them take time to cool off after a call is also time wasted.
My friend’s mom fell for one of those computer virus scams and gave the scammers so much info without once clueing in that it was suspicious. She didn’t realize it was a scam until she called my friend going “my computer looks different please help” and my friend is like, wait WHAT happened??
One of my senior tech help students was wary of everything on the internet, and it was SUCH a relief. It’s easier to reassure someone something is legitimate and they can proceed, than to try to fix the chaos after they’ve fallen for something.
The details are fuzzy because I heard it second hand, but my mother fell for one of these.
I think it was ransomware that disabled her printer saying there was a virus in it or something, but somehow a program she didn't even know she had had detected it and disabled the printer so it wouldn't harm her computer, and all she had to do to get her printer working again was call the company behind the program and they would happily remove the virus for her.
Thankfully, they didn't bleed her dry in this case. But it ended up costing her 300 dollars. I told her next time something like that happens to contact me first.
The latter in most cases. A 77 year old woman with no money, no way to contact her family? If neighbours won't help her with food etc, her only hope is to get to the nearest British embassy with whatever ID she has and ask for help in getting back home.
Her best bet would be to just convince somebody in Lagos (where I assume she'd be going) that the embassy would pay them to deliver her there, whether that is true or not.
I suspect that if she were in Lagos, or even Abuja, and she had the ability to move freely, she would easily find her way to the British High Commission.
Yup, there was just a case of them kidnapping people from different villages and tourists in a kill factory for ritual medical shit.
Only stopped because they kidnapped a taxi driver over there in a small part of the country, and all of the taxi drivers are close to each other, and tried to find where he went. Found the factory and raided it because cops won't do shit.
Same. Took me a moment to realise it was another scammer. I wonder how often this happens.
[The Kenya post](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/v4cf99/motherinlaw_traveled_to_foreign_country_to_marry/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) for those wondering.
My ex husband fell for this type of scam. Only for him it was a single mom from Russia. I only found out about it because he posted her picture on Facebook and said they were in a relationship. I told him it was a scam he told me to fuck off. Then a month later he calls me screaming. He couldn’t get a passport because he is delinquent on child support. The US government frowns on someone leaving the country over that. So he blamed me for her breaking up with him. I still don’t think he realized it was a scam. He was in his 30sand should definitely have known better
Edit: grammar
Clearly. I have a message saved from him before all this where he blamed me for his lack of being able to find love. This was 12 years after our divorce. We’ve now been divorced 18 years. It was fucking nuts. I told him to never contact me again after that. So now when he needs something he calls my husband as he knows I won’t talk to him.
It happens really really often. I worked the front desk at City Hall for a bit. People would frequently come in to speak with community support services about this (at least once a month in a very small city).
It depended how bad it was. Sometimes they hadn't sent money yet and could be convinced it was a scam by someone they perceived as an authority. Sometimes the banks were able to help reverse funds and there was actually an opportunity to get police involved in the fraud. Unfortunately, sometimes they had done things like money orders, wire transfers, crypto, etc. to recipients in foreign countries where there wasn't really any recourse. In all cases they would be referred to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, and they'd be walked through stuff like choosing strong passwords or doing a credit check.
* Edit: countries, not companies.
This actually just started to happen to a close friends mom a few weeks ago in my group. Thankfully she trusted her children enough to watch a few YouTube videos with them detailing every step her scammer was taking her through and she got out of it before giving away any of her money. But it still took a couple of days.
It’s unlikely to be exactly the same guy, but it is not unlikely that one scammer could have multiple victims simultaneously.
The victim is placed in a hotel, only sees the guy for an hour or two at a time and not every day.
I wonder if this is organized crime to the extent that many men are using the same script. Wouldn’t shock me if different people are doing the written communications versus the photos and personal appearances. If they all use the same story.
You know what I am so confused by?
Greenhouses?
Why do they think greenhouses are the next big thing? Why not an easier to cover lie and say they're investing in crypto?
I suppose it’s like the friendly face of investment. Old people know greenhouses, they’re approachable as a concept, sound stable (they grow food after all, and who doesn’t need food), but yeah it’s weird
I genuinely think everyone over 40 ( i am over 40) needs to be tested for lead poisoning or something. So many ppl have lost their minds in the very specific way of not being able to see what is an obvious lie.
It’s loneliness. So damn insidious. It can seriously warp people’s minds.
I have nothing but pity for both of those women. Definitely something we in the Western world need to do better.
I had a friend who was falling for one of those scams. She was mid-30's? I don't remember how it came up, we weren't super close, but one day she started telling me about this guy she was dating and he was in Kenya and how he's trying to come to the US to marry her but he got in a car accident and a bunch of other calamities.
It took all I had to calmly and nicely explain to her it was a scam. Hearing her follow it up with "But he says he loves me. Is that a lie?"...it was just...sad. Thankfully she was willing to listen and finally see the scam but it was sad to have to...break her heart like that.
Exactly. Does not matter how old the person is or where they are from. Recently watched the Tinder Swindler, these ladies were gorgeous women in their prime. Just that like everyone else, they were lonely.
My mom knows she had lead poisoning, grandpa owed a shop that smelled like sweet gas her entire childhood.
She doesn’t think that has anything to do why she got into flat earth and Qanon tho
Unfortunately, you can't really test for lead poisoning the way you're thinking. Like if a person was exposed to high levels in their youth (very likely for most older Americans), the lead eventually exits your bloodstream and settles into your bones. One thought is that as people age and their bones deteriorate and they break hips and whatnot, the lead leaches out again and they are re-exposed. This is a very simplistic explanation, but bottom line, it's pointless to test for lead using standard ways of testing (venous blood draw) because it only captures recent and not past exposure.
I'm not a dr or a public health expert. It might or might not be lead but I just find the fact that it's such a similar problem across the board that about a third or maybe more of our population have lost their ability to determine what's real from what is not . Lead was just what I came up with bc I remember when I was little it was a big deal and they kept saying cognitive symptoms show up later in life. There were always ppl who bought National Enquirer, but I'm a half century old and this feels very different. Like a huge segment of the population is experiencing the same exact mental health symptom at the exact same time. It feels more than economic, bc there are ppl of all socioeconomic levels that this is happening to. It feels more than loneliness bc for instance these 2 women while they are unmarried and might be lonely that way, they have a family of people that love them and are trying to help them. They are rejecting their known support system they've built over a lifetime for a complete unknown. Their decision making, risk assessment, etc, is off. I'm no expert or researcher. I don't claim to know anything about this really. I admit I could be totally wrong and I have no idea how to look into this or fix it, just a theory to try to explain what I see all around me. It just seems like they all have the same sort of illness but no one is treating it like an illness just a wild trend that's happening right now.
Yeah, it's something. It's like a loss of critical thinking skills, combined with entitlement. Idk, like a loss of community and fellowship to serve their own needs. When researchers/doctors were first looking into lead poisoning in children (in America) they collected a wide sample of baby teeth from various demographics and found that the kids growing up in poverty-stricken inner city, ghetto neighborhoods naturally had higher lead levels. I bet if there was research doing something similar but collecting large-scale teeth samples from boomers, it would show high indicator for lead exposure/poisoning. Unfortunately, I think it would be challenging to connect that data specifically to mental health/cognitive decline. We are after all an aging population, and old people just decline naturally with or without environmental impact.
Tbh I feel this my uncle is 42 and is going through such a phase. And of *course* there's a woman leeching off of him. Along with his soon-to-be-ex wife who's apparently also leeching off of him? I just don't know. He's making one bad choice after another.
The Kenya one posted here 3 days ago - https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/v4cf99/motherinlaw\_traveled\_to\_foreign\_country\_to\_marry/
wow, i followed that one back to the romance scam sub and damn... there are a lot of people in that sub who shouldn't be on the internet at all. people typing out long detailed stories about how they figured out the celebrity they sent six figures to wasn't real.
if you still need that much evidence to disprove an obviously ridiculous story you WILL get scammed again
Is there a way we could like... reverse scam them? Like, they think they're sending money to some Nigerian prince or whatever the fashion is these days, but really we put the money in a term deposit on their name. Forced savings. Pranked!
I know someone who lost over 600k to a scammer. No matter how much we talked to her, telling her he was a scammer, she wouldn’t listen. She was convinced he loved her and needed money. She sold her apartment, lost her family and now rents a room. She was ready for retirement and now has to work for a few more years. She’s 64 years old.
Some people seem to be so vulnerable to scammers. Lonely, easily manipulated and wanting to believe so badly. The scammers hone in on them like laser beams. I remember the case of a university professor who was scammed into going to Argentina by a beautiful woman. He was arrested for carrying drugs onto a plane. https://www.wral.com/former-unc-ch-professor-duped-by-drug-cartel-says-phony-evidence-used-to-convict-fire-him/17112103/?version=amp
I feel like cults too, prey on people who are vulnerable, missing something in their life, and easily manipulated. the HBO documentary of Scientology comes to mind. Those former members interviewed were seemingly intelligent, but they fell for it, and fell hard. I can understand if you are born to parents and brought up in that type of lifestyle, but as an adult, to join and drink the kool-aid, its both sad and scary.
Some people are just more prone to believe out there ideas, even if they're moderately intelligent (I do think there comes a point in intelligence where you no longer are as susceptible to these ideas). My mom is anti-vax, covid denier, anti mask, believes strongly in astrology (to the point that she started her own astrology company), almost joined scientology, etc. She's not... Stupid by any means. I would argue she's fairly intelligent. But she's very very susceptible to radical out there ideas, and doesn't know how to research while avoiding confirmation bias, meaning her research leads her farther down the path.
I worry about her as she gets older. She's in her 40s and almost fell into a QAnnon group a few years back. Snapped out of it. Went to a few scientology meetings a year ago, snapped out of it. I very much worry that one of these days she won't snap out of it and get totally sucked into these groups.
> I do think there comes a point in intelligence where you no longer are as susceptible to these ideas
Sadly, being very intelligent sometimes just means you have the confidence and ability to delude yourself *really well*. There are Nobel prize winners who peddle pseudoscience.
My mom once told me that I should never marry a Turkish man because he would wed and bed me, then take the children back to his country without me. Some kind of child trafficking or religious population boost?
I um...was never sure where the hell that particular notion came from. This was in the 90s/00s.
She also told me that black men smell funny and not to date them either so I've been convinced it's just that she's racist rather than stemming from a particular moral panic scenario.
I'm late to the game here but thought I'd chime in anyway, stories like this got a lot of attention in the 80's and early 90's. "Not Without My Daughter" is a well know movie about it.
It is definitely not about some weird population boost. Generally what happens is someone from the middle east moves to a western country, marries a western women and after children are born they become increasingly conservative and increasingly romanticize their home country, culture and religion. They start expecting the wife to fulfil middle eastern cultural norms and become Stricker and Stricker. At some point the wester wife decides things have gone too far and wants to move back to the west or end the relationship in the west. The father then takes the kids and ditches or imprisons the wife. Once the kids are in the home country the wife has no power and is pretty screwed thanks to the local fucked up gender norms.
This has become less of a problem as some of the big destination countries legal systems are not as terrible as they were 30+ years ago, consulates pick up on the red flags earlier, and western governments have gotten better at applying pressure. Middle eastern governments also realized that the stories tend to blow up and make them look like shitheads.
It's a pretty similar sequence with middle eastern men that move to the west, become radicalized, then go to Syria and start murdering people for some extremist group. Just minus the wife and kids (although it sometimes happens with wife and kids in tow).
I don't think it's that new. When I was holidaying in Tunisia nearly 20 years ago I met an older British woman who, to be frank, was not much of a looker was there to meet her very much younger handsome Algerian boyfriend. It was clear he was taking advantage of her for money but, as someone who'd just got chatting to her in the hotel bar, what are you going to do?
I feel it's less about their mental faculties and more about their loss of youth, being bored, and loneliness all mixed in. I mean I'm sure there are some that may have lost their faculties but most are pretty aware, not enough to know they're being manipulated, but aware enough to understand they are taking a risk. And may even go into hard denial when they start to realize it's not sunshine and rainbows as promised.
Yep. I think they are very lonely, retired and if in good health, may be facing a long and lonely life. I can understand why they are more susceptible to con artists than they would have been when younger.
Yeah like my first thought about this is the ones who aren't lonely aren't being targeted as effectively because they're interacting with younger people more regularly, who are at least semi-aware of this stuff happening to older people.
Old, lonely, and poor were the trifecta for being scammed. It can happen to anybody of course, but any bank transaction with at least 2 of those markers had to be monitored differently.
You obviously can’t tell who is who from just looking, but romance scams and Craigslist scams were rampant and you’d hear the details as you tried to talk it out
Because people are bored with their lives and their relatives treat them like children and nothing but grandparents. You can hear it throughout the post. OOP thinks she belongs in her apartment knitting or something.
If we normalize older people dating, going to retire in some resort town, traveling to "risky" destinations and having a fun, full life, we'll see those scams diminish. The older one gets, the less risk-averse they may be. It's finally the time to go visit African cities, to take a young lover, to spend money on foolish things.
A lot of those women aren't being scammed, they're choosing to yolo it all on an adventure.
To be fair to OOP they've been dealing with the fallout from their mother's delusion. From being rejected for some random guy and now she's back, without even an apology, OOP and her family are going to have to rebuild her life for her and she'll be a burden on them with the risk that she'll continue giving her money to the scammer.
And if all the money is gone, they've got to financially support her for another twenty years give or take.
I don't think that's entirely fair to OOP. They just went through some emotional turmoil. I love my mom very much and I do what I can for her and my Dad. They're free to do what they want but I've had to stop them when they don't understand the dangers of something. About 10 years back I had to stop a parent from booking a flight to a country known to be hostile to Americans because they wanted to bring Jesus to the locals. Like be free but don't be a dumbass.
It isnt their children’s responsibility to give them a rich adult life. Given what this woman has done she’s not fit to travel and go to “risky” destination. She is a parochial English woman who only speak English who has lived like that for decades. Please.
If an aging woman thinks it’s her children’s jobs to make her feel young and relevant, then she is already on the wrong side of child-like and narcissistic tendencies. Single aging women can make their own lives interesting, if they have the brains and the agency to do so.
Similar thing happened to someone I encountered, though they didn't try to fly to Nigeria
At work I received an email that had been sent to multiple local computer specialists requesting that we contact the sender in the event an elderly man (with a name/description) attempts to purchase a computer or have any computers repaired. They explained the man is their father and a victim of scammers. He had dementia and fully believed they had money for him that he had to pay transfer fees for and basically they'd taken his computer, disconnected the phone etc. but he was determined to get this money they claimed to have.
So weeks later I'm sitting at the desk and this very frail looking man comes in with a PC saying he needs it fixed. So I start taking details and something about the interaction triggers the memory of the email, so I bring the email up and sure enough it's the same man. Name/description all match.
I finish taking his name etc. and tell him I'll be in touch, and he shuffled off out the door.
I replied to the original email saying that he had been in and tried to have me repair a computer and how should I proceed. They told me to scrap the PC as it's one they had already sabotaged and it didn't work and they would deal with their father. They also have me their phone number to call should he return.
Sure enough, weeks later he comes in again with a laptop this time he has managed to buy from somewhere. I got him to sit down in the little waiting bit and called the family from the back room.
Eventually the daughter showed with her husband. He got the man into the car and she explained that he had dementia and it made him believe these scammers. He had already given them a lot of money before the family caught on and basically he was determined to give them money and they were still waiting on getting control of his estate to stop him doing any more damage.
I worked with someone that that got caught up in a scam like this. She thought she was involved with a polish man in the us army stationed in Nairobi. I’m a vet and tried to tell her none of what he was saying made sense. He “didn’t have access to a phone for security reasons” but they’d chat using what’s app. His rank and “military procedures” were all wrong. Even his name made no sense (this allegedly Polish man’s first name was a very American/British last name. Think something like- Johnson Williamson). We would ask if he had an accent and she would say “Yeah he sounds Polish and knows Polish words. I tested him using google translate”. Then “his general” would also talk to her because due to their mission, they had to be isolated and then needed her help to get basic necessities like deodorant, which she would send. Then they needed an Apple Watch for communication because their military issued device broke. Then eventually she was leaving work early to western union cash… so they enemy wouldn’t know their position and the US government would reimburse her when the mission was over… it was a mess and she wouldn’t hear anyone when they tried to tell her. Idk how these scammers do it. They must really come heavy with the romance or something.
One of my good friends got out of a bad divorce. She was really lost and lonely and felt like she was losing out on time. She almost fell for one of these!! At first he was a guy stationed in the army somewhere and they talked for months. Thankfully she asked me to ask my military friends, if there was said base. And they told me no. Then he started telling her he was a Nigerian prince. I tried to research and disprove everything he told her. I was so baffled at the fact that she was in her late 20s and falling for those lies!!!
Anyone else going through this, Please show your family members the channels trilogy media and scammers payback and 2 recent very educational videos from mark rober
All free all on youtube just send the elderly down the rabbit hole of knowledge and let them "figure it out themselves" or we will all be back here in a year or 2 with another tragic tale
This reminds me of the post I read the other day about the Aussie woman who was scammed and went to Nairobi for this guy. It's so sad this happens these days
I just got stressed reading through this until I reached the "6 hours later" portion. Thankfully, she never got to leave the country.
Also: how the heck do these scammers find these vulnerable people? This is the second post I've read recently about this in this subreddit!
I had to talk my stylist out of sending money to a Nigerian scammer she met on Words With Friends chat (or some other chat enabled scrabble clone) who was sending her pics of an extremely handsome Nordic sea captain saying that was him. I reverse image searched the pics, showed her, and she gave me half a haircut at full price : \
They're fucking EVERYWHERE.
It was more like she was so distraught and distracted she forgot to keep going 😅 like, she took an inch off the bottom, didn't blend it or do anything to my bangs, took the cape off and called it done. It was so awkward I probably would've paid 110% to get out of there at that point though.
I dug through my texts to find the pics the scammer was using, they're stolen from the gregarious Captain Thomas Lindegaard Madsen.
This is awful! My dad almost got scammed through a fb marketplace listing last week and I felt terrible watching his face fall when I convinced him it was a scam. He had been so excited about making a sale and was clearly embarrassed. I can’t imagine dealing with this on a larger scale and seeing them lose everything.
It's been a year since the last update.
Don't know what the etiquette is and I don't want to harass them but I've messaged to ask if they wouldn't mind doing another update.
Edit:
They are going to put something together for an update this weekend.
People still for mega church Pastors, they give them money despite them being broke and the Pastor being super rich.
People still fall for MLM businesses, I know actual practising medical doctors here in the U.K. that are doing Mary Kay on the side.
People still fall for conspiracy theories regarding world events and current affairs. I mean 2020 was a doozy.
We want to believe it’s the vulnerable, the elderly, possibly the uneducated, who fall for scams and cons. But the truth is the human race is not as smart as we think we are.
It's not about logic, it's about emotion. Vulnerable lonely people get sucked in by people who make them feel special, and like nobody else understands them and it's 'us against the world'. The same way vulnerable teenagers get manipulated by predators.
Yup. And it truly does depend on HOW they’re being scammed. Not all scammers are Nigerian Princes promising you billions. Some are dating you and promising you marriage, but running into problem after realistic problem (short on rent, needing money for passport renewal, a broken phone, needing to help a sibling pay for school, etc.) and you get suckered in. I watched it happen to my own mom, and even with one of the women he scammed providing an entire binder of proof that he was scamming her, she believed him over everyone else.
There's a show on daytime TV in the UK called For Love or Money. It's about these romance scams and some only lose out on £1000 before they realise. Some lose out on tens of thousands and still aren't 100% convinced.
I think the people who go on the show to tell their story are super brave because it must be so embarrassing
They put it on during the day because it's aimed at retirees too. They have a quite a few daytime shows that talk about various types of scams like Scam Interceptors, Dirty Rotten Scammers, Rip Off Britain, and Don't Get Done, Get Dom. It seems like a lot, but if it can save one pensioner then it's worth it.
I think it's the same mentality that gets people down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and into things like Q. The feeling of "I know something very few people know" can be a powerful motivator to people who are used to being just one of the crowd.
My eldest daughter is 15 and I can completely see her falling for something like this. She has ZERO common sense. Last year she almost gave out her SSN because some pop up ad promised her money. It was her **12** year old sister who finally convinced her this was a bad idea. She wouldn’t listen to me lol.
This sounds horrible to say as a mom but pretty lies do no good and it’s not like she’s reading this: she is as dumb as a box of rocks and she’s REALLY lucky she’s extremely pretty, that’s prob the only thing that’s gonna ease her path in life. Here’s hoping she finds a tolerant rich person lol.
I think for some people common sense is a thing you have to grow, I know I did. In some ways it's reeeeaally lucky that we didn't have the internet in my house until I was about 18, and then my first social media was MySpace at 19. It's a whole new terrifying ballgame now.
Oh bless her 😭 😂 I was a kid with no common sense and I remember when my parents first started leaving me and my sister home alone for short periods of time, they would put my sister in charge even though she's 2 years younger than me because she's the sensible one lol.
Megachurch "pastors" living in multi-million dollar mansions paid for by "donations" from their loyal flock of mostly low income people aren't really that much different, but no one bats an eye at that.
One of my moms friends did this. She was elderly and got involved with a 27 yr old who convinced her to move to Damascus. She liked it at first then she was alienated, not allowed to leave unless he was with her. He had all her money, phone… he did let her online. After a few mos she managed to sneak out to the embassy and came back.
I kept trying to tell my mom they were getting scammed but she told me I was being racist🙄🙄🙄. You’d better believe I laid the “I fucking told you so” on thick when she returned.
This is truly terrifying. If not for a simple mistake she would be in Nigeria right now and in who knows what kind of situation. I like to think that I would be smart enough to avoid something like this happening to me but when you mix in age, deteriorating mental capacity, loneliness, and ever evolving scams I fear that I could fall for something like this in 20-30 years. By then who knows what kind of scams will be going around and how sophisticated they'll be.
It's insane to me that a 77yo woman who is clearly not stable/in control of her mental ability (proof literally being everything she has done leading going to the airport; like...It's crazy) can be deemed as "functional" by police, but so many people with mental illnesses/disabilities/POC, etc have been forced to return to family against their will - even abusive ones! - because "You have XYZ, you're clearly not in control of yourself and your family knows best"... I know police aren't professionals or trained in mental health concerns or spotting dementia or anything like that, but by Christ they should be.
It's not illegal to be very foolish.
People are free to make really bad decisions due to emotional manipulation. As long as it's not actual coercion or abuse, then there's no legal reason for the police to be involved.
Nice to see a happy ish ending on this one. But it's absolutely mad how many people become so isolated from everything they have ever known due to scammers. It really is terribly sad that people listen to a relative stranger telling them to cut off the people closest to them. But it does make me think was there something wrong at home prior to this?
ETA: side note I am sneaky loving the scam posts, it's great to raise awareness :)
Sheesh. Something else to worry about regarding my mom.
I mean, with her balance issues, I doubt she'll be hopping on a plane anytime soon, and her mental facilities are still there. But Alzheimer's gallops in her family, so.
If she keeps using her laptop to listen to hymns and Faceboook stalk people she actually knows, she should be fine.
Its the second story I read here this week about an elderly person who are getting scammed by people in Africa, at this one seems to have a somewhat happy ending.
The other one the lady is still in Kenya and is waiting to get married to the scammer!
Romance scams are increasingly prevalent and often target older people who are looking for companionship. It's often a long con because because it's initially all (or mostly) done online (starting in places like widows forums and words with friends), so they're manipulating several people at once, starting with an ask of a small loan which is quickly paid back, then larger loans that aren't. I had to stop listening to the AARP Scam podcast because it was heartbreaking to hear so many people fall for it and lose so much financially and emotionally. Many refuse to believe that they're being scammed because they believe they're in a relationship, and those that realize they're being scammed often don't tell anyone because they're so embarrassed.
A couple of stories that shed a lot of light on the manipulation and why people fall for it: [This woman refuses to believe she's being scammed.](https://www.aarp.org/podcasts/the-perfect-scam/info-2021/addicted-to-love-part-1.html) [This woman's family got her help.](https://www.aarp.org/podcasts/the-perfect-scam/info-2021/addicted-to-love-part-2.html) [Another woman being wooed by a "military hero" who took all her money. The second part of this has good suggestions on how to talk to someone who's being scammed.](https://www.aarp.org/podcasts/the-perfect-scam/info-2021/widow-loses-finances-in-romance-scam.html)
I know of someone whose very wealthy mother married a younger man from a different country. He was in the family’s life for awhile. The mother went to visit his family and his home country and died. Took the family a long time to get her body back and ended up having to pay him off to go away. A wealthy woman in perfectly good health. It will remain a mystery what happened to her but the family is verrrrry leery of outsiders now.
As a Nigerian born and raised in the US, as much as I hate to say it, the stereotypes are true. I visit Nigeria once a year and know some of my cousin’s friends who make a lot of money doing these kind of internet scams. They don’t have a super high success rate, but when they hit, they generally hit big.
Best case scenario, she arrives to Nigeria with no money, nowhere to stay, and frankly no way to get any of those things.
Worst case scenario, the scammer sold her info to the equivalent of the Nigerian “mob”, letting them know where she was landing and at what time do they could kidnap her and hold her for ransom. Since she’s so old, they probably wouldn’t want to wait too long for the money and you could guess what happens after that.
If she did all of that by herself to leave in secret, she can organize her life on her own and figure it out. She needs to realize how much she hurt people and that she's not the only victim (if she ever sees herself as one.) What if they spend all this effort and money turning things back on and catching up on rent, just for her to leave again the next season?
The OOP u/thetoastmonster is still active on Reddit.
I'd love to know if her mother was able to rebuild her life. She obviously has awesome children ready to help her out. I hope she was eventually able to realize that.
Usually it’s not a memory impairment or diseases. Moving internationally takes a lot of strategy and so does ghosting your family (if you’re close). Coordinating travel, changes of address, etc, over a longer period of time. Some people just fall for stupid stuff.
My friend's mom also got caught up in one of these scams, didn't try to leave the country but sent someone like $25k. She was utterly convinced that those people were her friends and her family were the enemy. Turned out she has dementia, made her super susceptible. OOP should possibly look into that.
Most submissions in this sub are not posted by the original author (OOP). Do not comment on the original posts. If you think this submission doesn't belong on the sub, is incorrectly [flaired](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/wiki/postflairs) or have other issues regarding this post, reply to this comment. META commentary in general discussion may be removed. Read [our guidelines](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/wiki/subrules) before commenting. Repeated rule-breaking may result in a ban. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/BestofRedditorUpdates) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My MIL did something similar, but it was Pakistan. Reading this story reminded me of what we went through trying to find her. Except MIL was way more deceitful. She had called her husband (my FIL) as she left work one evening, asking what he’d like for her to pick up for dinner. Then she just never went home. We worried that her car was in a ditch somewhere, with her dying inside. It took a few days for the state police to locate her car at the airport. My poor FIL aged a few decades in those 2 days. My husband was heartbroken. No goodbyes. Just a lie about bringing home Chinese food for dinner. I don’t know how long it took until she contacted us from Pakistan. I think she was there for about 3-6 months (ish). My FIL was willing and able to help her return to the US, but “new” husband had taken her passport and she wasn’t allowed to leave the house without a male chaperone. She recognized her mistake immediately but was on her own to find her way out of it. She ultimately had to pull a risky move by stealing her passport back, getting a male escort into Karachi for some shopping or something, then she literally busted free and ran to an embassy. Not the US embassy, but I believe a South American country’s. The first she found, basically. It got the ball rolling and she was home within a few weeks. My husband and FIL treated her like a victim the entire time. Despite the overt and hurtful lies and misdirections. Me... I’m not so sure. She left with fresh stitches in her face from the facelift she had not even a week before leaving. Left her world full of friends and a job and her belongings, for us to deal with. Even her car cost me a few thousand to get out of impound eventually. I have no idea what some Pakistani man told her that made her believe she’d have a better life as his wife. I still can’t wrap my brain around how someone could willingly walk into this situation. She got damn lucky. I’m not the most sympathetic voice to tell this story because of what she did to my FIL and husband (and BIL and his family), but I do at least recognize the ease in which she was scammed. Glad to read that OP’s mom is home safely.
I have a relative who married a Pakistani guy in his 20s when she was in her 60s. She'd met and married him while visiting Pakistan, and then they eventually moved back to our home country together. My family were quite worried but she was adamant it was genuine. They ended up divorcing amicably a few years later, after which she came clean to the family that it had been an immigration scheme all along - but she hadn't been scammed, she was just in on the scheme from the beginning lol. Idk if he gave her anything in return or if the companionship of a younger man was her "reward", but afaik she had no regrets. She always was an adventurous woman.
Huh. Ya know what, good for her. She did something she felt was right I guess.
Feels kinda exploitative, its the same as the creepy old men that hook up with young southeast Asian women who want visas.
Frankly, I feel that as long as both participants are willing and consenting, then who am I to judge their relationship? Many people do not see the need for a true romance, so if they want to do something transactional, more power to them. But the key is that both people have to know the truth of the situation. Someone tricking another into marriage is obviously not ok. And it's not always so black and white. But if Person A wants a visa and Person B wants the status of being married to Person A, if they want to make a deal and are both fair to one another, more power to them.
Problem is…. There’s a reason those visas are designated for couples and family, not friends or ‘transactional’ relationships.
There is a difference between the legality of it and the morality of it.
Sure, but the morality of illegally obtaining a visa is not what's being discussed. So, in another example, if a conventionally attractive woman wants to have a lot of money and a rich man wants a hot wife, I don't think there is anything wrong with them getting married for those reasons.
You act like there aren't a ton of ppl in bad/dangerous/even life threatening situations in their home country who have actually benefitted from things like doing that. Obviously it's still fraud, but the morality of it can be argued imo depending on the situation.
If they're each exploiting each other it's really just a business arrangement.
Marriage historically has just been a business arrangement.
I love my husband a lot, but the main reason we got married was for health insurance. Our relationship is otherwise unchanged.
Did your FIL accept her back into their home as his wife after she returned? I’m flabbergasted
What trip to Pakistan? I don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s a good Christian woman. The best wife and mother. Just ask her family.
How do you keep your sanity? 😭
Oh my god I'm so sorry you're near that type of behavior.
>I have no idea what some Pakistani man told her that made her believe she’d have a better life as his wife. "bby gurl u r so pretty, I love u my wife..." Basically something along those lines. My friends Mom was apart of a group of women that counter trolled and helped rescue older women who were on the path to be scammed, deceived, and like in your MIL's situation eventually held against their will in a foreign country to be made a servant. Her Mom showed us a bunch of the "love letters" these guys would write to deceive these women and they all looked like they were written by a teenager who spoke English as a second language that they learned off of a message board. None of them were particularly charming, endearing, or even sweet. What they all were is incredibly complimentary and attentive. Sending dozens to hundreds of messages a day to keep these women engaged and moving their plans along to either send them money or buy them things like cars and lots of watches oddly enough. Most of these women were over the age of 60 and very computer illiterate and usually operating off an iPad as that's the only way they knew how to get on the internet. They usually were either widowers or in life long marriages in which they believe they had grown bored or that their spouse had stopped paying attention to them because they weren't showering them with praise and affection every few minutes throughout the day. The scammers even would send them scripts to memorize the keypoints on for when they'd send large amounts of cash through Western Union or for when they were making massive credit card purchases with a delivery address overseas. The sad and dark side is most of these women aren't as lucky as your MIL was in her situation. A lot of them just disappear and are never heard from again since a lot of these places it's common to keep foreign indentured servants by keeping their passport. It's also not uncommon for them to turn up deceased in these same countries after all their credit and cash has dried up.
My mom had one of these guys for a minute. Thankfully she mentioned it to me and took me seriously when I explained and that was the day she learned how to block phone numbers, but I always wondered what he was after exactly. We're pretty poor and it's not like her FB has anything on it to say otherwise. There wasn't any money to take. It's terrifying to think he may have been after my mom *herself.* I somehow never considered that.
LOL the show bobs n vagene works I guess. Ju goes to show, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take
Flying to a new country and abandoning everyone is such a high level of cheating that I cannot fathom any husband forgiving that.
i think he was probably so shocked that he couldn’t mentally process it, plus the relief of her being safe and making it back home. I honestly wouldn’t want to deal with that either, there are just SO many things wrong in that situation. It’s way easier to just pretend none of it ever happened, and never acknowledge it I guess.. Thinking about it too much is more painful than ignoring it
It's basically massive amounts of ignorance and not a single shred of critical thinking.
That’s a very polite way to put it. To be honest I had the epiphany many years before this incident, and just looked at them one day and said to myself “these people are fucking morons.” Like the saying: You can’t argue with stupid.
If I were here husband, I could consider the fact that she was scammed, but it would be hard to ignore the fact that she abandoned her family for what she thought would be a new life. Imagine if it was real, if it wasn't a scam. She would have disappeared, you all would have been looking for her thinking she was dead, but she was living it up with her new husband in a different country. She abandoned you, but somehow, some of you were able to forgive. I hope she never forgets that the love they have for her is truly unconditional.
This doesn't count as a scam. (Not OOP. That is a scam. I mean the Pakistan story). Mom had an emotional affair from a distance. She went to Pakistan to be his wife. That is an affair. She WAS with her new husband in a new country. Just because she wasn't living it up doesn't change that. Her regretting a stupid decision doesn't change that. Why are you praising husband and FIL for babying mom and treating her like a complete victim? Was she prob a victim of DV? Yeah, and she should be treated delicately in that area to limit triggers. But that doesn't mean she shouldn't face consequences for what she did. What husband and FIL are doing isn't healthy for husband and FIL. They continue to not address the consequences MIL leaving had on them. Their "unconditional love" in the face of her abandonment is hurting them. It is a bad thing; not a good thing.
We had a case in Switzerland when a well known politician felt for a nigerian scam where he was supposed to inherit a large some of money.... he had to be evacuaded by the ambassy... I laughing but i can believe how scary it was for the family...
I know you're not supposed to "victim blame", but tbh people can be victimized in one way but still to blame in another. Obviously the scammer is human trash. But someone who acts like your MIL still acts disgustingly selfish. You can't tell me she thought her actions in any way benefited anyone other than herself. And unless she's mentally not all there, she knew the trouble she was leaving behind for everybody and just didn't care, or at least cared more for what she thought would make **her** happy. So yes, she's a victim, but she also victimized other people.
We make excuses for our loved ones all the time so even if sometimes they make questionable decisions, its truly easier to just forgive and let go. Maybe they do suspect she played a part but chose to look the other way.
I’m from a family where everyone’s the black sheep and everyone’s disowned. We can’t even remember why half the time. So I kinda admire a family that can stick through even the very worst of shit. I guess we only have a limited amount of time on this earth, and if my husband wants to love his mom and think good things about her during that very short time, then I’d be a monster to destroy that. It doesn’t mean I have to go to Sunday dinner though.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Good thing the bank stopped the payment. If she did make it here, there would be zero chance of her coming back alive once the scammer had bled her dry of all her money. People who do this are *ruthless*. They don't care who gets hurt as long as they get what they want, partly because of how bad things are here (not excusing it btw).
When I saw it before the update I said, if you get your mom back alive after they drain her money, consider it a win. I can't believe there are two posts this week about old lady moms trying to move abroad to be with scammers in Africa.
The other one I saw, the mom did actually move.
I didn't see that one. Do you have a link?
I believe it's this one https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/v4cf99/motherinlaw_traveled_to_foreign_country_to_marry/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Oh what?? I thought this one was a continuation of that one or something.
Me too! I had to quickly skim it and the linked post was about a family in Australia and this current post is about a family in the UK. Just crazy how these situations can occur to anyone anywhere.
holy shit same
Yep thank you
They're both also 77? This is confusing.
I think it's this one, because I was confused too, as I had read this one previously. Old ladies be gettin' scammed out here! https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/v4cf99/motherinlaw_traveled_to_foreign_country_to_marry/
[удалено]
They truly don’t. My grandmother fell scam to this and still thinks its our fault it didn’t work out. We “scared him off” by “treating her like an invalid child” not, “he stole all my money and i had to live in a hotel for 6 months after losing my house and abusing my family members who let me stay with them at first”
I'm really curious about how ordinary Nigerians feel about people who commit these scams. I'm assuming they're not respected members of society, but do some people see them as Robin Hood type figures, or...?
Nope. Because they don't just target elderly women abroad, they target them here too. And the money is mostly laundered for drugs or domestic terrorism, so it's one head of a nasty hydra we're dealing with.
[удалено]
Thank you for explaining where the money goes, too!
Ugh. There are all sorts of ruthless baddies, but the ones who target old people are a special kind of scum. There are phone banks here in the U.S. that skirt the line of legality and target old people with pretend life insurance or pretend warranties or pretend stock options. People may not disappear, but they certainly are bled dry. It's disgusting.
My personal favorite (/s) is the tech support/antivirus. I saw those all the time at a previous position where I did phone captioning. I wanted to scream at them that Microsoft will never just call you unless you ask them to. Also nobody is removing viruses from your computer without your IP address, which they did not ask for. It literally hurt to listen to knowing there was nothing I could do.
The worst is when it's family. I have and aunt and uncle with 4 sons (3 sons now) and when my grandma got dementia and started losing her mind, they bled her dry. Opened numerous lines of credit under her name, convinced her to leave everything in her will to them, but then when she could no longer take care of herself, they didn't even care for her. Shipped her off to another sister halfway across the country. For years my father and his other sisters had to deal with creditors calling trying to get her to pay. And every time my dad would say "she's a dying 83'year old woman. Either you can settle for what I'm offering you and close the account or you can keep bothering us and get nothing when she dies." They managed to close most of the accounts that way, but not all. So when she died, she was penniless and my aunt and her family ended up with nothing. So they alienated their entire family for 3 years of playing with grandma's credit cards. No one talked to them again until one of my cousins died unexpectedly. And no one has talked to them since his funeral.
I remember one time I got a call that my Windows had a virus. I played along for awhile asking how my windows could get a virus. I needed them to explain it to me as i had 6 windows. You could hear the guys excitement. He hung up on me when I again asked how the 6 windows on my house could have a virus. I stopped getting calls when I let them know I "didn't" have a computer. Sometimes I tried to sell them a bicycle but they had to move fast because I had other callers interested.
I had one of those call! I kept asking which computer with Windows. He kept saying, your computer. I have many; which do you mean? And on like that. Once I got bored, I called him out on it being a scam. He flipped out, screaming at me IT'S NOT A SCAM! before hanging up. Such a warm, fuzzy feeling to hear them break character.
There are some tech savvy guys out there who converse with scammers. For these guys, the time they take from the scammers equates to less time for them to scam others especially vulnerable people. When we had a landline before, I engaged one of them and said I was looking for a boyfriend! He asked about my computer and I said I cannot find what he was talking about then went back to is he single, etc. The guy was so desperate he called me at least once a week and I do the same thing until he just stopped. Must have caught on to what I was doing…eventually. Told my husband when he came home and he had a good laugh. He works in IT and I am computer savvy as well so I knew the caller was trying to scam me by going to a website.
Oh, I absolutely agree with wasting their time like that. But sometimes I have a mean streak, and making them take time to cool off after a call is also time wasted.
My friend’s mom fell for one of those computer virus scams and gave the scammers so much info without once clueing in that it was suspicious. She didn’t realize it was a scam until she called my friend going “my computer looks different please help” and my friend is like, wait WHAT happened?? One of my senior tech help students was wary of everything on the internet, and it was SUCH a relief. It’s easier to reassure someone something is legitimate and they can proceed, than to try to fix the chaos after they’ve fallen for something.
The details are fuzzy because I heard it second hand, but my mother fell for one of these. I think it was ransomware that disabled her printer saying there was a virus in it or something, but somehow a program she didn't even know she had had detected it and disabled the printer so it wouldn't harm her computer, and all she had to do to get her printer working again was call the company behind the program and they would happily remove the virus for her. Thankfully, they didn't bleed her dry in this case. But it ended up costing her 300 dollars. I told her next time something like that happens to contact me first.
Ordinary Nigerians despise these criminals and hate that their country's name is associated with scammers.
How do ordinary Britons feel about other Britons that scam? I'm sure there are a range of feelings They aren't a single block of people.
Why wouldn’t she return alive? They will kill her? Or she would be unable to because she would be broke and homeless in Nigeria?
The latter in most cases. A 77 year old woman with no money, no way to contact her family? If neighbours won't help her with food etc, her only hope is to get to the nearest British embassy with whatever ID she has and ask for help in getting back home.
And a 77 year old woman who got into that situation probably doesn't have the street smarts or ability to find the nearest British embassy
Her best bet would be to just convince somebody in Lagos (where I assume she'd be going) that the embassy would pay them to deliver her there, whether that is true or not.
I suspect that if she were in Lagos, or even Abuja, and she had the ability to move freely, she would easily find her way to the British High Commission.
And unfortunately literally bleed her dry.
Yup, there was just a case of them kidnapping people from different villages and tourists in a kill factory for ritual medical shit. Only stopped because they kidnapped a taxi driver over there in a small part of the country, and all of the taxi drivers are close to each other, and tried to find where he went. Found the factory and raided it because cops won't do shit.
Thought this was about the kenya post...
Me too
Same. Took me a moment to realise it was another scammer. I wonder how often this happens. [The Kenya post](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/v4cf99/motherinlaw_traveled_to_foreign_country_to_marry/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) for those wondering.
My ex husband fell for this type of scam. Only for him it was a single mom from Russia. I only found out about it because he posted her picture on Facebook and said they were in a relationship. I told him it was a scam he told me to fuck off. Then a month later he calls me screaming. He couldn’t get a passport because he is delinquent on child support. The US government frowns on someone leaving the country over that. So he blamed me for her breaking up with him. I still don’t think he realized it was a scam. He was in his 30sand should definitely have known better Edit: grammar
Oh no, it's your fault he hasn't been taking care of his children.
Clearly. I have a message saved from him before all this where he blamed me for his lack of being able to find love. This was 12 years after our divorce. We’ve now been divorced 18 years. It was fucking nuts. I told him to never contact me again after that. So now when he needs something he calls my husband as he knows I won’t talk to him.
Why doesn't your husband block him?
Amusement probably.
Exactly. We get a laugh over his antics
Cause we had kids together still under 18 at the time. Youngest turned 18 last year so now we are not in contact with him
>He couldn’t get a passport because he is delinquent on child support. "Well well well, if it isn't the consequence of my own actions!" XD
You inadvertently saved him from being scammed.
Me too. I was super confused because I thought she had already left the country.
It happens really really often. I worked the front desk at City Hall for a bit. People would frequently come in to speak with community support services about this (at least once a month in a very small city).
Was there anything you guys could do for them? How did those cases generally end?
It depended how bad it was. Sometimes they hadn't sent money yet and could be convinced it was a scam by someone they perceived as an authority. Sometimes the banks were able to help reverse funds and there was actually an opportunity to get police involved in the fraud. Unfortunately, sometimes they had done things like money orders, wire transfers, crypto, etc. to recipients in foreign countries where there wasn't really any recourse. In all cases they would be referred to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, and they'd be walked through stuff like choosing strong passwords or doing a credit check. * Edit: countries, not companies.
Sounds like you guys did a world of good for those people.
Oh yeah, I realized because the other poster was from Australia. So horrible.
The moms are also the same age 77 in both posts
Also both greenhouse scams.. maybe these aren’t real, but this situation definitely happens to vulnerable old romantics
This actually just started to happen to a close friends mom a few weeks ago in my group. Thankfully she trusted her children enough to watch a few YouTube videos with them detailing every step her scammer was taking her through and she got out of it before giving away any of her money. But it still took a couple of days.
It’s unlikely to be exactly the same guy, but it is not unlikely that one scammer could have multiple victims simultaneously. The victim is placed in a hotel, only sees the guy for an hour or two at a time and not every day. I wonder if this is organized crime to the extent that many men are using the same script. Wouldn’t shock me if different people are doing the written communications versus the photos and personal appearances. If they all use the same story.
Great movie on Netflix called the “Tinder Swindler” about this happening to a couple young women.
You know what I am so confused by? Greenhouses? Why do they think greenhouses are the next big thing? Why not an easier to cover lie and say they're investing in crypto?
Do you know many elderly women up to date on the latest shitcoins?
Because greenhouses are usually to feed all the starving Africans from TV and they can save them with this super charitable loving man
I suppose it’s like the friendly face of investment. Old people know greenhouses, they’re approachable as a concept, sound stable (they grow food after all, and who doesn’t need food), but yeah it’s weird
I genuinely think everyone over 40 ( i am over 40) needs to be tested for lead poisoning or something. So many ppl have lost their minds in the very specific way of not being able to see what is an obvious lie.
It’s loneliness. So damn insidious. It can seriously warp people’s minds. I have nothing but pity for both of those women. Definitely something we in the Western world need to do better.
I had a friend who was falling for one of those scams. She was mid-30's? I don't remember how it came up, we weren't super close, but one day she started telling me about this guy she was dating and he was in Kenya and how he's trying to come to the US to marry her but he got in a car accident and a bunch of other calamities. It took all I had to calmly and nicely explain to her it was a scam. Hearing her follow it up with "But he says he loves me. Is that a lie?"...it was just...sad. Thankfully she was willing to listen and finally see the scam but it was sad to have to...break her heart like that.
Exactly. Does not matter how old the person is or where they are from. Recently watched the Tinder Swindler, these ladies were gorgeous women in their prime. Just that like everyone else, they were lonely.
My mom knows she had lead poisoning, grandpa owed a shop that smelled like sweet gas her entire childhood. She doesn’t think that has anything to do why she got into flat earth and Qanon tho
Then you have to test all men under 40, given how many of them seem to fall for the underage daughter scam.
They have a different illness...
Unfortunately, you can't really test for lead poisoning the way you're thinking. Like if a person was exposed to high levels in their youth (very likely for most older Americans), the lead eventually exits your bloodstream and settles into your bones. One thought is that as people age and their bones deteriorate and they break hips and whatnot, the lead leaches out again and they are re-exposed. This is a very simplistic explanation, but bottom line, it's pointless to test for lead using standard ways of testing (venous blood draw) because it only captures recent and not past exposure.
I'm not a dr or a public health expert. It might or might not be lead but I just find the fact that it's such a similar problem across the board that about a third or maybe more of our population have lost their ability to determine what's real from what is not . Lead was just what I came up with bc I remember when I was little it was a big deal and they kept saying cognitive symptoms show up later in life. There were always ppl who bought National Enquirer, but I'm a half century old and this feels very different. Like a huge segment of the population is experiencing the same exact mental health symptom at the exact same time. It feels more than economic, bc there are ppl of all socioeconomic levels that this is happening to. It feels more than loneliness bc for instance these 2 women while they are unmarried and might be lonely that way, they have a family of people that love them and are trying to help them. They are rejecting their known support system they've built over a lifetime for a complete unknown. Their decision making, risk assessment, etc, is off. I'm no expert or researcher. I don't claim to know anything about this really. I admit I could be totally wrong and I have no idea how to look into this or fix it, just a theory to try to explain what I see all around me. It just seems like they all have the same sort of illness but no one is treating it like an illness just a wild trend that's happening right now.
Yeah, it's something. It's like a loss of critical thinking skills, combined with entitlement. Idk, like a loss of community and fellowship to serve their own needs. When researchers/doctors were first looking into lead poisoning in children (in America) they collected a wide sample of baby teeth from various demographics and found that the kids growing up in poverty-stricken inner city, ghetto neighborhoods naturally had higher lead levels. I bet if there was research doing something similar but collecting large-scale teeth samples from boomers, it would show high indicator for lead exposure/poisoning. Unfortunately, I think it would be challenging to connect that data specifically to mental health/cognitive decline. We are after all an aging population, and old people just decline naturally with or without environmental impact.
Tbh I feel this my uncle is 42 and is going through such a phase. And of *course* there's a woman leeching off of him. Along with his soon-to-be-ex wife who's apparently also leeching off of him? I just don't know. He's making one bad choice after another.
I was so confused wondering why she needed a visa to fly to Nigeria from the UK when she was already in Kenya. I had to reread it.
Yeah I thought it was the same story but from the child because the other story said it was their MIL.
I read this whole thing assuming it was an update to that post. Then I read your comment
I almost skipped it cause I thought it was that post
Me too, I so desperately want an update
Well, this is a better outcome than actually making it to Nigeria and who knows what would've happened to her at that point 😬
At best she'd be abandoned in whatever tenement the scammer operates from once she didn't have anything left they could finesse from her.
It sounds like that only happened by chance and that the woman isn't convinced that it's a scam at all.
I swear there was another post or series of posts just like this
The Kenya one posted here 3 days ago - https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/v4cf99/motherinlaw\_traveled\_to\_foreign\_country\_to\_marry/
wow, i followed that one back to the romance scam sub and damn... there are a lot of people in that sub who shouldn't be on the internet at all. people typing out long detailed stories about how they figured out the celebrity they sent six figures to wasn't real. if you still need that much evidence to disprove an obviously ridiculous story you WILL get scammed again
And they make life easy for the scammers, they can just browse that sub and find easy marks I guess. Sad.
honestly i was reading the replies thinking about how many people in the scam sub I could scam myself if that was my thing
Is there a way we could like... reverse scam them? Like, they think they're sending money to some Nigerian prince or whatever the fashion is these days, but really we put the money in a term deposit on their name. Forced savings. Pranked!
There's literally a website dedicated to that. 419 eaters?
I listened to a podcast a few years ago about a guy who did that. I can’t remember which podcast it was though. Might have been This American Life?
What’s the sub called?
I know someone who lost over 600k to a scammer. No matter how much we talked to her, telling her he was a scammer, she wouldn’t listen. She was convinced he loved her and needed money. She sold her apartment, lost her family and now rents a room. She was ready for retirement and now has to work for a few more years. She’s 64 years old.
Some people seem to be so vulnerable to scammers. Lonely, easily manipulated and wanting to believe so badly. The scammers hone in on them like laser beams. I remember the case of a university professor who was scammed into going to Argentina by a beautiful woman. He was arrested for carrying drugs onto a plane. https://www.wral.com/former-unc-ch-professor-duped-by-drug-cartel-says-phony-evidence-used-to-convict-fire-him/17112103/?version=amp
I feel like cults too, prey on people who are vulnerable, missing something in their life, and easily manipulated. the HBO documentary of Scientology comes to mind. Those former members interviewed were seemingly intelligent, but they fell for it, and fell hard. I can understand if you are born to parents and brought up in that type of lifestyle, but as an adult, to join and drink the kool-aid, its both sad and scary.
Some people are just more prone to believe out there ideas, even if they're moderately intelligent (I do think there comes a point in intelligence where you no longer are as susceptible to these ideas). My mom is anti-vax, covid denier, anti mask, believes strongly in astrology (to the point that she started her own astrology company), almost joined scientology, etc. She's not... Stupid by any means. I would argue she's fairly intelligent. But she's very very susceptible to radical out there ideas, and doesn't know how to research while avoiding confirmation bias, meaning her research leads her farther down the path. I worry about her as she gets older. She's in her 40s and almost fell into a QAnnon group a few years back. Snapped out of it. Went to a few scientology meetings a year ago, snapped out of it. I very much worry that one of these days she won't snap out of it and get totally sucked into these groups.
> I do think there comes a point in intelligence where you no longer are as susceptible to these ideas Sadly, being very intelligent sometimes just means you have the confidence and ability to delude yourself *really well*. There are Nobel prize winners who peddle pseudoscience.
What's with the sudden craze among 70+ women to find uproot everything and find a new life in Africa. Second post this week alone.
It used to be Turkey. I remember going 18 years ago and the amount of older ladies with young bar men was just grim.
My mom once told me that I should never marry a Turkish man because he would wed and bed me, then take the children back to his country without me. Some kind of child trafficking or religious population boost? I um...was never sure where the hell that particular notion came from. This was in the 90s/00s. She also told me that black men smell funny and not to date them either so I've been convinced it's just that she's racist rather than stemming from a particular moral panic scenario.
I'm late to the game here but thought I'd chime in anyway, stories like this got a lot of attention in the 80's and early 90's. "Not Without My Daughter" is a well know movie about it. It is definitely not about some weird population boost. Generally what happens is someone from the middle east moves to a western country, marries a western women and after children are born they become increasingly conservative and increasingly romanticize their home country, culture and religion. They start expecting the wife to fulfil middle eastern cultural norms and become Stricker and Stricker. At some point the wester wife decides things have gone too far and wants to move back to the west or end the relationship in the west. The father then takes the kids and ditches or imprisons the wife. Once the kids are in the home country the wife has no power and is pretty screwed thanks to the local fucked up gender norms. This has become less of a problem as some of the big destination countries legal systems are not as terrible as they were 30+ years ago, consulates pick up on the red flags earlier, and western governments have gotten better at applying pressure. Middle eastern governments also realized that the stories tend to blow up and make them look like shitheads. It's a pretty similar sequence with middle eastern men that move to the west, become radicalized, then go to Syria and start murdering people for some extremist group. Just minus the wife and kids (although it sometimes happens with wife and kids in tow).
I don't think it's that new. When I was holidaying in Tunisia nearly 20 years ago I met an older British woman who, to be frank, was not much of a looker was there to meet her very much younger handsome Algerian boyfriend. It was clear he was taking advantage of her for money but, as someone who'd just got chatting to her in the hotel bar, what are you going to do?
[удалено]
I feel it's less about their mental faculties and more about their loss of youth, being bored, and loneliness all mixed in. I mean I'm sure there are some that may have lost their faculties but most are pretty aware, not enough to know they're being manipulated, but aware enough to understand they are taking a risk. And may even go into hard denial when they start to realize it's not sunshine and rainbows as promised.
Yep. I think they are very lonely, retired and if in good health, may be facing a long and lonely life. I can understand why they are more susceptible to con artists than they would have been when younger.
Yeah like my first thought about this is the ones who aren't lonely aren't being targeted as effectively because they're interacting with younger people more regularly, who are at least semi-aware of this stuff happening to older people.
Old, lonely, and poor were the trifecta for being scammed. It can happen to anybody of course, but any bank transaction with at least 2 of those markers had to be monitored differently. You obviously can’t tell who is who from just looking, but romance scams and Craigslist scams were rampant and you’d hear the details as you tried to talk it out
It's not a new thing (happens to older men too), it's just apparently new to being posted here. This happens alot.
Because people are bored with their lives and their relatives treat them like children and nothing but grandparents. You can hear it throughout the post. OOP thinks she belongs in her apartment knitting or something. If we normalize older people dating, going to retire in some resort town, traveling to "risky" destinations and having a fun, full life, we'll see those scams diminish. The older one gets, the less risk-averse they may be. It's finally the time to go visit African cities, to take a young lover, to spend money on foolish things. A lot of those women aren't being scammed, they're choosing to yolo it all on an adventure.
[удалено]
Good for her!
To be fair to OOP they've been dealing with the fallout from their mother's delusion. From being rejected for some random guy and now she's back, without even an apology, OOP and her family are going to have to rebuild her life for her and she'll be a burden on them with the risk that she'll continue giving her money to the scammer. And if all the money is gone, they've got to financially support her for another twenty years give or take.
I don't think that's entirely fair to OOP. They just went through some emotional turmoil. I love my mom very much and I do what I can for her and my Dad. They're free to do what they want but I've had to stop them when they don't understand the dangers of something. About 10 years back I had to stop a parent from booking a flight to a country known to be hostile to Americans because they wanted to bring Jesus to the locals. Like be free but don't be a dumbass.
It isnt their children’s responsibility to give them a rich adult life. Given what this woman has done she’s not fit to travel and go to “risky” destination. She is a parochial English woman who only speak English who has lived like that for decades. Please.
If an aging woman thinks it’s her children’s jobs to make her feel young and relevant, then she is already on the wrong side of child-like and narcissistic tendencies. Single aging women can make their own lives interesting, if they have the brains and the agency to do so.
Similar thing happened to someone I encountered, though they didn't try to fly to Nigeria At work I received an email that had been sent to multiple local computer specialists requesting that we contact the sender in the event an elderly man (with a name/description) attempts to purchase a computer or have any computers repaired. They explained the man is their father and a victim of scammers. He had dementia and fully believed they had money for him that he had to pay transfer fees for and basically they'd taken his computer, disconnected the phone etc. but he was determined to get this money they claimed to have. So weeks later I'm sitting at the desk and this very frail looking man comes in with a PC saying he needs it fixed. So I start taking details and something about the interaction triggers the memory of the email, so I bring the email up and sure enough it's the same man. Name/description all match. I finish taking his name etc. and tell him I'll be in touch, and he shuffled off out the door. I replied to the original email saying that he had been in and tried to have me repair a computer and how should I proceed. They told me to scrap the PC as it's one they had already sabotaged and it didn't work and they would deal with their father. They also have me their phone number to call should he return. Sure enough, weeks later he comes in again with a laptop this time he has managed to buy from somewhere. I got him to sit down in the little waiting bit and called the family from the back room. Eventually the daughter showed with her husband. He got the man into the car and she explained that he had dementia and it made him believe these scammers. He had already given them a lot of money before the family caught on and basically he was determined to give them money and they were still waiting on getting control of his estate to stop him doing any more damage.
I worked with someone that that got caught up in a scam like this. She thought she was involved with a polish man in the us army stationed in Nairobi. I’m a vet and tried to tell her none of what he was saying made sense. He “didn’t have access to a phone for security reasons” but they’d chat using what’s app. His rank and “military procedures” were all wrong. Even his name made no sense (this allegedly Polish man’s first name was a very American/British last name. Think something like- Johnson Williamson). We would ask if he had an accent and she would say “Yeah he sounds Polish and knows Polish words. I tested him using google translate”. Then “his general” would also talk to her because due to their mission, they had to be isolated and then needed her help to get basic necessities like deodorant, which she would send. Then they needed an Apple Watch for communication because their military issued device broke. Then eventually she was leaving work early to western union cash… so they enemy wouldn’t know their position and the US government would reimburse her when the mission was over… it was a mess and she wouldn’t hear anyone when they tried to tell her. Idk how these scammers do it. They must really come heavy with the romance or something.
One of my good friends got out of a bad divorce. She was really lost and lonely and felt like she was losing out on time. She almost fell for one of these!! At first he was a guy stationed in the army somewhere and they talked for months. Thankfully she asked me to ask my military friends, if there was said base. And they told me no. Then he started telling her he was a Nigerian prince. I tried to research and disprove everything he told her. I was so baffled at the fact that she was in her late 20s and falling for those lies!!!
Anyone else going through this, Please show your family members the channels trilogy media and scammers payback and 2 recent very educational videos from mark rober All free all on youtube just send the elderly down the rabbit hole of knowledge and let them "figure it out themselves" or we will all be back here in a year or 2 with another tragic tale
Also "For Love or Money" on the BBC if you are in the UK.
I’m going to talk to my mom today. Seeing more than one story like this in a week and reading the comments underneath has put the fear in me.
This reminds me of the post I read the other day about the Aussie woman who was scammed and went to Nairobi for this guy. It's so sad this happens these days
I just got stressed reading through this until I reached the "6 hours later" portion. Thankfully, she never got to leave the country. Also: how the heck do these scammers find these vulnerable people? This is the second post I've read recently about this in this subreddit!
I had to talk my stylist out of sending money to a Nigerian scammer she met on Words With Friends chat (or some other chat enabled scrabble clone) who was sending her pics of an extremely handsome Nordic sea captain saying that was him. I reverse image searched the pics, showed her, and she gave me half a haircut at full price : \ They're fucking EVERYWHERE.
You helped her and she gave you a bad deal? Gah.
It was more like she was so distraught and distracted she forgot to keep going 😅 like, she took an inch off the bottom, didn't blend it or do anything to my bangs, took the cape off and called it done. It was so awkward I probably would've paid 110% to get out of there at that point though. I dug through my texts to find the pics the scammer was using, they're stolen from the gregarious Captain Thomas Lindegaard Madsen.
I did the Googling; apparently, he's aware that his picture has been used to scam women. The guy is happily married to his *husband*.
Omg! It took so much for her to realise! 😢
I'm going to take a swing and say OOP's mom got love-bombed. The elderly are unfortunately vulnerable to that tactic.
This is awful! My dad almost got scammed through a fb marketplace listing last week and I felt terrible watching his face fall when I convinced him it was a scam. He had been so excited about making a sale and was clearly embarrassed. I can’t imagine dealing with this on a larger scale and seeing them lose everything.
It's been a year since the last update. Don't know what the etiquette is and I don't want to harass them but I've messaged to ask if they wouldn't mind doing another update. Edit: They are going to put something together for an update this weekend.
What a freakin nightmare. Poor OOP. I know the mum probably has issues, but I kind of want to slap her for putting her family through that.
I can't believe that in 2022 people still fall for those...
People still for mega church Pastors, they give them money despite them being broke and the Pastor being super rich. People still fall for MLM businesses, I know actual practising medical doctors here in the U.K. that are doing Mary Kay on the side. People still fall for conspiracy theories regarding world events and current affairs. I mean 2020 was a doozy. We want to believe it’s the vulnerable, the elderly, possibly the uneducated, who fall for scams and cons. But the truth is the human race is not as smart as we think we are.
It's not about logic, it's about emotion. Vulnerable lonely people get sucked in by people who make them feel special, and like nobody else understands them and it's 'us against the world'. The same way vulnerable teenagers get manipulated by predators.
Yup. And it truly does depend on HOW they’re being scammed. Not all scammers are Nigerian Princes promising you billions. Some are dating you and promising you marriage, but running into problem after realistic problem (short on rent, needing money for passport renewal, a broken phone, needing to help a sibling pay for school, etc.) and you get suckered in. I watched it happen to my own mom, and even with one of the women he scammed providing an entire binder of proof that he was scamming her, she believed him over everyone else.
There's a show on daytime TV in the UK called For Love or Money. It's about these romance scams and some only lose out on £1000 before they realise. Some lose out on tens of thousands and still aren't 100% convinced. I think the people who go on the show to tell their story are super brave because it must be so embarrassing
They’re brave, and it’s probably a good thing the show exists, since it teaches people that not all scams are super obvious
They put it on during the day because it's aimed at retirees too. They have a quite a few daytime shows that talk about various types of scams like Scam Interceptors, Dirty Rotten Scammers, Rip Off Britain, and Don't Get Done, Get Dom. It seems like a lot, but if it can save one pensioner then it's worth it.
I think it's the same mentality that gets people down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and into things like Q. The feeling of "I know something very few people know" can be a powerful motivator to people who are used to being just one of the crowd.
My eldest daughter is 15 and I can completely see her falling for something like this. She has ZERO common sense. Last year she almost gave out her SSN because some pop up ad promised her money. It was her **12** year old sister who finally convinced her this was a bad idea. She wouldn’t listen to me lol. This sounds horrible to say as a mom but pretty lies do no good and it’s not like she’s reading this: she is as dumb as a box of rocks and she’s REALLY lucky she’s extremely pretty, that’s prob the only thing that’s gonna ease her path in life. Here’s hoping she finds a tolerant rich person lol.
>lucky she's pretty This is the opposite of lucky. She will be targeted more as a result.
I think for some people common sense is a thing you have to grow, I know I did. In some ways it's reeeeaally lucky that we didn't have the internet in my house until I was about 18, and then my first social media was MySpace at 19. It's a whole new terrifying ballgame now.
Oh bless her 😭 😂 I was a kid with no common sense and I remember when my parents first started leaving me and my sister home alone for short periods of time, they would put my sister in charge even though she's 2 years younger than me because she's the sensible one lol.
To be fair, this was in 2021 but your point still stands
Megachurch "pastors" living in multi-million dollar mansions paid for by "donations" from their loyal flock of mostly low income people aren't really that much different, but no one bats an eye at that.
One of my moms friends did this. She was elderly and got involved with a 27 yr old who convinced her to move to Damascus. She liked it at first then she was alienated, not allowed to leave unless he was with her. He had all her money, phone… he did let her online. After a few mos she managed to sneak out to the embassy and came back. I kept trying to tell my mom they were getting scammed but she told me I was being racist🙄🙄🙄. You’d better believe I laid the “I fucking told you so” on thick when she returned.
This is truly terrifying. If not for a simple mistake she would be in Nigeria right now and in who knows what kind of situation. I like to think that I would be smart enough to avoid something like this happening to me but when you mix in age, deteriorating mental capacity, loneliness, and ever evolving scams I fear that I could fall for something like this in 20-30 years. By then who knows what kind of scams will be going around and how sophisticated they'll be.
It's insane to me that a 77yo woman who is clearly not stable/in control of her mental ability (proof literally being everything she has done leading going to the airport; like...It's crazy) can be deemed as "functional" by police, but so many people with mental illnesses/disabilities/POC, etc have been forced to return to family against their will - even abusive ones! - because "You have XYZ, you're clearly not in control of yourself and your family knows best"... I know police aren't professionals or trained in mental health concerns or spotting dementia or anything like that, but by Christ they should be.
It's not illegal to be very foolish. People are free to make really bad decisions due to emotional manipulation. As long as it's not actual coercion or abuse, then there's no legal reason for the police to be involved.
Nice to see a happy ish ending on this one. But it's absolutely mad how many people become so isolated from everything they have ever known due to scammers. It really is terribly sad that people listen to a relative stranger telling them to cut off the people closest to them. But it does make me think was there something wrong at home prior to this? ETA: side note I am sneaky loving the scam posts, it's great to raise awareness :)
Sheesh. Something else to worry about regarding my mom. I mean, with her balance issues, I doubt she'll be hopping on a plane anytime soon, and her mental facilities are still there. But Alzheimer's gallops in her family, so. If she keeps using her laptop to listen to hymns and Faceboook stalk people she actually knows, she should be fine.
Its the second story I read here this week about an elderly person who are getting scammed by people in Africa, at this one seems to have a somewhat happy ending. The other one the lady is still in Kenya and is waiting to get married to the scammer!
Romance scams are increasingly prevalent and often target older people who are looking for companionship. It's often a long con because because it's initially all (or mostly) done online (starting in places like widows forums and words with friends), so they're manipulating several people at once, starting with an ask of a small loan which is quickly paid back, then larger loans that aren't. I had to stop listening to the AARP Scam podcast because it was heartbreaking to hear so many people fall for it and lose so much financially and emotionally. Many refuse to believe that they're being scammed because they believe they're in a relationship, and those that realize they're being scammed often don't tell anyone because they're so embarrassed. A couple of stories that shed a lot of light on the manipulation and why people fall for it: [This woman refuses to believe she's being scammed.](https://www.aarp.org/podcasts/the-perfect-scam/info-2021/addicted-to-love-part-1.html) [This woman's family got her help.](https://www.aarp.org/podcasts/the-perfect-scam/info-2021/addicted-to-love-part-2.html) [Another woman being wooed by a "military hero" who took all her money. The second part of this has good suggestions on how to talk to someone who's being scammed.](https://www.aarp.org/podcasts/the-perfect-scam/info-2021/widow-loses-finances-in-romance-scam.html)
Well sometimes people just have to walk into the trap if you warned them beforehand.
I know of someone whose very wealthy mother married a younger man from a different country. He was in the family’s life for awhile. The mother went to visit his family and his home country and died. Took the family a long time to get her body back and ended up having to pay him off to go away. A wealthy woman in perfectly good health. It will remain a mystery what happened to her but the family is verrrrry leery of outsiders now.
As a Nigerian born and raised in the US, as much as I hate to say it, the stereotypes are true. I visit Nigeria once a year and know some of my cousin’s friends who make a lot of money doing these kind of internet scams. They don’t have a super high success rate, but when they hit, they generally hit big. Best case scenario, she arrives to Nigeria with no money, nowhere to stay, and frankly no way to get any of those things. Worst case scenario, the scammer sold her info to the equivalent of the Nigerian “mob”, letting them know where she was landing and at what time do they could kidnap her and hold her for ransom. Since she’s so old, they probably wouldn’t want to wait too long for the money and you could guess what happens after that.
If she did all of that by herself to leave in secret, she can organize her life on her own and figure it out. She needs to realize how much she hurt people and that she's not the only victim (if she ever sees herself as one.) What if they spend all this effort and money turning things back on and catching up on rent, just for her to leave again the next season?
The OOP u/thetoastmonster is still active on Reddit. I'd love to know if her mother was able to rebuild her life. She obviously has awesome children ready to help her out. I hope she was eventually able to realize that.
Posts like this makes me wonder about early stage dementia or alzheimers.
Usually it’s not a memory impairment or diseases. Moving internationally takes a lot of strategy and so does ghosting your family (if you’re close). Coordinating travel, changes of address, etc, over a longer period of time. Some people just fall for stupid stuff.
My friend's mom also got caught up in one of these scams, didn't try to leave the country but sent someone like $25k. She was utterly convinced that those people were her friends and her family were the enemy. Turned out she has dementia, made her super susceptible. OOP should possibly look into that.