I still can’t get around the gullibility of people. Like the victim in this case, I lost a spouse so was grieving. I have been targeted online by these scammers. Unlike the victim here, I could see it a parsec off. They are fairly easy to spot. Usually there is a hard luck story long before the requests for money. Orphaned in tragic circumstances and a catalogue of things going wrong – accidents, terminal illness and so on. Supposedly close to the target geographically, but out of the country at the moment so cannot meet up. Also, being generally of African origin, they don’t use English as a native and often invoke God in some way in their use of language – lots of God bless for example. They write how they think English people speak so get it wrong in little subtle ways. As they steal images from other sites to use for profiles, a reverse search catches them out, too.
So, despite being recently widowed, I spotted it fairly easily. They didn’t get as far as asking for money because I had sussed them. But even if I hadn’t at that point, the asking for money is the clincher. Always is.
H/T Peter Kirk via email.
A police officer? Seriously?
Yup. There’s no hope.
Exactly. Police recruiting gullible fools like this woman as ‘officers of the law’ is a prima facie case of why police now are useless at preventing or solving crime, but great at being thugs in uniform
tbh I do not believe her £500k claim – crowdfunding sympathy scam?
If you want to know how gullible people can be, I would reccomend the book Flim Flam by James Randi. He takes down all kinds of charlatans who use basic magic tricks to convince idiots that they have genuine supernatural powers. Reading it it was not so much the mediums, fortune tellers and psychics that appalled me but the imbeciles who gave such people their money. As Tim Minchin said, These people aren’t plying a skill, they’re either lying or mentally ill. Even after Randi demonstrated to the victims of these frauds exactly how their tricks were done, they refused to believe that they had been scammed.
My mum had a similar experience, the scammer claimed he was a surgeon with the UN on duty at the Baghram Army base in Syria (obviously a scam as that base is in Afghanistan) but he had prepared things so if you googled the name he’d given you’d hit pages that backed up his story, etc.
The only thing that stopped my mum getting robbed was that she isnt tech savvy so when the inevitable request for cash came she genuinely offered to send him a cheque as she didnt use internet banking.
I guess he thought she was taking the piss as she never heard from him after that.
A narrow escape, then. One of the problems with this type of scam is the emotional attachment. Even after the scam has been revealed, the victim has difficulty letting go of the mirage they were chasing.
This reminded me of the story of the Aussie bloke lured to Nigeria by a ‘lady promising love’. He was kidnapped on arrival, taken to a cashpoint where they emptied his bank account, then on to a flat where he was tied up. The police were alerted when he began phoning family and friends at home asking for money. Upon his release he was most grateful to the police, but it was when he made the comment “it’s not the first time it’s happened” I laughed out loud.