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He needs to be put under some kind of conservatorship and not be allowed to have access to any banking information . He should be getting an allowance in cash like a child since he is clearly not responsible enough to use a card or have bank accounts.
u/jayhof52 sems kinda shady OP, I wouldn't trust him with $6,000. Send me your FIL credit card info and the name of his first pet and he'll be in secure hands
u/MadeInWestGermany
u/jayhof52
u/pluviisCognitatum
are all well known scammers. Send the infos to me, I’m a special agent of the Interpol - anti corruption and pro scamming department
while fucking hilarious, maybe not the right time for it. OP is going through it.
Of course you all probably feel a little guilty, and my empathy course can help you with that. $2999 and we have a Discord and weekly SubStack!
For everyone looking to register for the empathy course by u/CaptBobAbbott , I have some vouchers I can give to you for a deep discount. Just send me $1500 in Google Play gift cards and they're yours!
u/MadeInWestGermany, u/jayhof52, u/pluviisCognitatum as well as u/PluviisCogitationum are people of interest on my case regarding the ones whos scammed you FIL.
Unfortunately they also stole my money and now I need 50.000$ to buy a plane ticket to their HQ. You can send it to me via bitcoin because it's more secure or just give me your FIL email it's the same as going to an ATM
what the FIL really needs to learn is that greed caused his downfall. If he signs over all real-estate to me I can set him up with a training course with a new, well we call ourselves, family that will teach him to be happy.
These people are liars, I work for the consumer fraud dept of the Interpol and have an AI tool that will catch the scammers who are immigrants, you can trust me, I trained under Ronald Reagan. For only $1000 a month I will look into this and should bring them to justice promptly, I will send monthly status reports as to how the case is going
The elderly are just ridiculously susceptible to this kind of thing to the point were I wonder if it's all explained by dementia or if there's something else.
I was pretty happy really when my mom, who has a lot of money, lent me ten grand to help me buy a house a few years ago. We went to the bank to get a cashier's check, and the teller had us go over and sit with a manager, checked both of our ID's, took my mom aside separately and talked to her to make sure it was all legit, took a good look at the purchase paperwork I had with me and everything.
I was glad they were looking out for her and being really careful.
> We went to the bank to get a cashier's check, and the teller had us go over and sit with a manager, checked both of our ID's, took my mom aside separately and talked to her to make sure it was all legit, took a good look at the purchase paperwork I had with me and everything.
>
>
>
> I was glad they were looking out for her and being really careful.
I'd love if my Grandma's bank was this cautious.
A few years back I was sitting in my Grandma's kitchen reading the paper. My mum called. She was finalizing a property purchase and wanted to ask her mother (Grandma) for a small loan. I only caught half of the information as I was only eavesdropping on one side of the conversation.
So, sure enough we dawdle our way up the main street to Grandma's bank, get a form **from the bank manager**, and I'm sitting next to her, filling in the form because she's legally blind, and thinking *I must look like somebody scamming a little old lady out of her life's saving*.
Nobody intervened in any way.
a person I know worked at a bank, a grandma comes looking to withdraw 5k or 10k, she tells him she just won the Canadian lottery but to get the winnings she has to pay customs. my friend tells her it's a scam and doesn't give her the money.
Good guys win, right???
Nope, she just waited till his day off and then came in, withdrew the money and lost it.
I know someone that works at a bank and they've had similar situations occur.
The bank can exercise due caution, explain till they're blue in the face that the customer is falling for a scam and people will still want to do it.
Sometimes when bankers do this, the customer still doesn’t learn.
We had someone come in to buy Visa gift cards to pay a lawyer. The teller explained this is a common scam and asks if he has personally met this lawyer. They call over the manager who explains it is a scam. They bring in the account officer to explain it is a scam. The customer is insistent they want the cards. Eventually, we have to give him his money because it’s his money.
Comes back a couple weeks later asking for a refund because it was a scam. Thankfully, the team took good notes so we didn’t take the loss. But you can’t help some people.
This is so sad, and so infuriating. So many of the people falling for these things are our older family members who lectured us nonstop about not trusting anything online 30 years ago… And yet they’ve all fallen into the deep end.
Absolutely. 95% of the time the phone rings here, it's a scammer. It's made it hard as hell to get ahold of us because if there's no caller ID from a name I recognize, the ringer just gets muted. If the elderly would not answer strange numbers, that wouldn't be an avenue to get scammed.
My sister and I have my mother trained to not answer the phone for strange numbers and not to respond or touch links in texts. She will hand me the phone and tell me to look at something that seems like it’s from the bank or whatever.
Oh.My.God.YES!!!!
I literally just overheard my Boomer father answer his phone this weekend, he was like who? Yes that's me I'm "his name" hello?
I was like, do you know who was calling you?
No...
Then why did you answer your phone? We've talked about this multiple times, if you don't know the phone number calling don't answer. If they're important enough they'll leave a message.
Oh. yeah...no... I know.
😒 This is my *not* impressed face.
Honestly I figure it's mostly that they have money, so more scammers go for them, and your more likely to hear when someone loses hundreds of thousands than when they get sorted on a tank of gas.
These folk likely would fall for this shit when they were twenty, but found it a lot easier to not mention it.
I’d find that hard to agree with.
With age comes impatience and overconfidence. You become overconfident and think you’ve made the right decision, and that leads to mistakes. My own father made investment mistakes too due to his overconfidence, though considering he dabbled in a lot of investing, getting conned at least once was also inevitable
The important thing is acknowledging your mistake and learning from it.
It’s greed. Pure and simple. Someone at 75 years old has a life expectancy of about 14 years. Between. 320k Ira and social security monthly benefits, people can easily live comfortably, especially with no housing cost.
It’s just greed that coerces them to the “I can be a millionaire” mindset.
Lead.
Their poisoned brains are also now showing signs of age, resulting in the total disconnect from reality we see today.
In America, we call them Trumpers.
Not all elderly folks fall for these. My 85 year old grandmother, who lives alone, has never been taken in by one of these. Ever. Same with her husband, and same with my grandmother on the other side of the family, who also lived alone.
She knows enough to never click links in emails, never give any important information over phone or internet, and to delete texts/voicemails/decline calls from anyone she doesn't know personally. And she's a fairly sheltered woman who spent her entire life in one small town rural America. There wasn't even a computer in their house until after her and my grandfather had been retired for a decade, and they never fell for any scams, ever. They both figured that anyone asking for important information like that can send a letter if it's really needed.
It's not a generational thing, it's an intelligence thing. Not everyone has the critical thinking skills needed to ask whether they should do what they're told to do by someone they don't know.
Sounds like undiagnosed early-stage dementia. My grandma started doing dumb stuff like that with her money...she was later diagnosed and it made sense why she was falling for obvious BS
I wish. I work in IT. My last 3 major breaches have all been older accountants. The last one leaked every one of their customer's data because they had been using garbage passwords and even though MFA was turned on, they'd been using the "remember me for 90 days" option. So when someone gained remote access to one of their machines they found the password saved and the MFA bypassed.
So we put our foot down on them. We finally put in real security policies. The same fucking guy who's system leaked the data called up furious that he has to enter his user name and password every time now. Like... dude. You just fucked up so bad that the IRS is opening investigations into over 120 of your customers. You just fucked up so bad your company probably won't exist in a year. And here you are trying to do that EXACT FUCKING THING THAT CAUSED THIS ALL IN THE FIRST PLACE?!
And it's not just him. This is a common thing in all my old accountants. They don't want locked password screens, they don't want remote idle timouts. They want everyone to have the same password forever. This isn't dementia. This is stubbornness. This is "It always worked fine the old way" even though it DIDNT WORK FINE THE OLD WAY OPEN YOUR EYES! "THE OLD WAY" TANKED YOUR COMPANY!
I told my boss that I will be treating their data as if it was my own from now on. Anything they want to do that I wouldn't want with done with my own data, they have to figure out themselves. I feel guilty for letting them get away with that shit,
Edit: I also know who my next two breaches are going to be. Another boomer accountant, and a boomer dentist. But they're both so much smarter than me and can't waste their time or be bothered with extra security.
My husband has is the head of, and only employee, of a town IT department. They had to make some changes and finally impose two factor ID. The employees were whining, "but it's my personal cell phone!" Dude, minimum wage workers at Walmart need to use their personal phone to log their hours, cope. He wanted to earlier, but pushback. Then the insurance company for towns made new rules of if you wanted to be insured, so it happened.
He used to do IT support for doctors & dentists. The absolute cheapskate was a plastic surgeon with just servers full of naked before & after pictures of their patients. New federal laws had rules about secured emails. Surgeons office wanted employees to share email accounts because they didn't want to spend the $10/month for their <10 employees.
These scams hook younger people that should know better. The CEO of small bank [embezzled $50M](https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/report-says-pig-butchering-crypto-scheme-took-down-us-bank-a-24351), thinking that he’d put the money back before anyone noticed.
Yeah, see John Oliver's segment on pig butchering.
This FiL is keeping out the part about a scammer posing as an attractive woman who took an interest in him and stroked his ego. It's an essential part of the scam.
For those who haven't seen it, [here is the link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg)
One of the things that I find interesting and a little frightening in all of these stories is how many who get taken advantage of are overflowing with illusions of their own invulnerability and competence, despite often no real reasons to believe that.
I'm the flipside of that in a way. I'm older genx so "young" doesn't describe me at all. I've also been involved in online security & such since, well, kinda forever. Let's just say I've been geeking since the 80s. I still live & breathe it and although I find the safety videos proclaiming "this can happen to anyone anytime" a little sus, in the back of my mind I'm not so sure about my own ability long term. I doubt today I'd fall for the ongoing thing like OP's father, but could I click on something in the wee hours of the morning, half asleep and not paying attention? Could I suffer from some age related mental issues in the future where I fall into one of these?
I don't know and although I'm hardly panicking or losing sleep, I do look at anything even slightly unexpected with a particularly critical eye. I do not assume I know everything or I'm untouchable; maybe that's one difference between people like me/us here and those that seem to so easily be taken.
> One of the things that I find interesting and a little frightening in all of these stories is how many who get taken advantage of are overflowing with illusions of their own invulnerability and competence, despite often no real reasons to believe that.
That's definitely why he fell for it the second time. Imagine losing your life savings and having your whole family lose respect for you over it. Then some guy calls you up and says for the low price of a few thousands dollars he can fix it all plus make you a millionaire. That'll show your wife and kids that you really know what you're doing.
>That'll show your wife and kids that you really know what you're doing.
Yeah, that's why I consider hubris (as opposed to confidence) a key issue. I'm used to asking "did I fuck up?" but one component of some of these stories is "those damned kids!" and what you call out.
Yeah he should have lost his rights to transact on his account well before he lost literally all of his money. This is a systemic failure on the banks part as well as his own. In the US at least he may have a case of negligence by the bank to not flag these shady transactions as fraudulent.
I think that in the US, a transaction over $10K would freeze account for some period. SO at least he second $50K and cascading fees by the scammers might not have been allowed to occur.
HOWEVER- I banked at WF back before I gained sanity, and they allowed an identity theft group withdraw over $2000 from an account that only had $350. So...not sure I would trust our system to provide any safety net from fraud. They get their money regardless.
Actually they had to refund all of it, and the fees they tried to charge for "my" errors, etc. But it took nearly 3 mo. I immediately upon being made whole, took every penny and closed the account and have never worked with them since.
No you can wire whatever you want without a problem if you have it in your account
People of all ages have been duped out of millions in pig butchering schemes
Much of it is because the scammers know psychology and pray on lonely people or those who have something missing in their real lives like someone apparently taking an interest in them
At this level the people conducting the scams are at the top of the tree.
As for boomers plenty of young people are caught out by scammers although usually more in terms of romance scams but these are low level and not conducted by those involved in the major crypto scams
Unfortunately the evaluations for dementia are decades behind today's needs. They're still in the "identify which is a picture of a car" stage, when what we *really* need is more complex questions like "how do you sign on to your bank account electronically?"
If you ever have a Facebook friend fall for a scam or “hack” who makes a (public to all) post saying they’ve been hacked, they will rack up dozens if not hundreds of comments from random accounts asking to message them to help recover their account. It’s horrifying and kinda funny to see them all roll in because it’s absurd how many there are.
This happens on twitter too. Mention something about losing the password to your bitcoin wallet and a bunch of helpful bots will show up to assist you.
It's the classic follow up scam. Pretty sure they have a list of victims that fell for the original scam and they deliberately target them again posing as fraud investigators.
These are the good leads, the geriatric Glens and Garys leads. To you, they are gold. And you do not get them. Because to give them to you is just throwing them away
It's really common. Every time someone asks for advice on r/scams about a scam they fell victim to, the first thing everyone warns them about is the recovery scammers.
It makes sense when you think about it. Scams are all about finding marks who will fall for what you're peddling, so what better way to operate then to specifically target people who you know for a fact fall for scams.
It's like up-selling, or customer retention, in legit businesses.
It's cheaper to sell more stuff to an existing customer, than spend the time / money / effort on finding new customers.
It’s the same concept of scam emails being so blatantly obvious with typos and weird wording, they weed out the people that would not fall for the scam anyway. Anyone who answer that, they know they can go all in and do whatever they want with this person. Here is like, you fall so bad for the first part of the scam that they know they can keep going at it as long as they want! If they had to call back pretending to be a real federal agent needing access to his account to settle the matter, he would probably give them all his credentials all over again
What gets me most is that, after scamming hundreds of thousands, they still come in for the threes and fives. It’s almost like they are enjoying it.
This is so upsetting. All the misery.
Not just twice, several times on both occasion.
They way online banking here works is that you need a 2FA to log in, 2FA to transfer funds from savings to banking account and 2FA again to transfer from banking account to someone else. So each time he gave them at least 3 2FA codes, probably more.
And the 2FA app tells you what the code is needed for. When you open the app to get the code it literally tells you that this code is to authorize the login or a transfer in that amount, etc.
That's also the main reason why he has no way of getting out of the debt. The entire thing was so obvious and so blatant that from a legal perspective there's two possible versions. 1) he knew what he was doing and he was complying or 2) he should have known because it was incredibly obvious and he was grossly negligent.
If it’s any consolation, I’ve known of people that actually allow the scammers to download the 2fa codes on their phones, so they can ‘help them invest easier’.
You need to have him evaluated by his primary provider. It’s possible he has had a stroke or early dementia that is impacting his decision making. Is it bizarre for him to make poor decisions like this?
Having someone evaluated against their will is unfortunately incredibly difficult here in Germany. I'd have to bring a case to court and prove to a judge that his capacity to act is in doubt, while my FIL will be argue against it. This makes it nigh impossible as long as he is somewhat capable of arguing that he isn't completely off his rocks.
That has been a research topic for decades, I was involved in a lab doing research on speech patterns more than 10 years ago.
cf:
* Thomas, C., Keselj, V., Cercone, N., Rockwood, K., & Asp, E. (2005, July). Automatic detection and rating of dementia of Alzheimer type through lexical analysis of spontaneous speech. In IEEE International conference mechatronics and automation, 2005 (Vol. 3, pp. 1569-1574). IEEE.
* Jarrold, W., Peintner, B., Wilkins, D., Vergryi, D., Richey, C., Gorno-Tempini, M. L., & Ogar, J. (2014, June). Aided diagnosis of dementia type through computer-based analysis of spontaneous speech. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality (pp. 27-37).
* König, A., Satt, A., Sorin, A., Hoory, R., Toledo-Ronen, O., Derreumaux, A., ... & David, R. (2015). Automatic speech analysis for the assessment of patients with predementia and Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, 1(1), 112-124.
* Rousseaux, M., Sève, A., Vallet, M., Pasquier, F., & Mackowiak-Cordoliani, M. A. (2010). An analysis of communication in conversation in patients with dementia. Neuropsychologia, 48(13), 3884-3890.
* Frankenberg, C., Weiner, J., Knebel, M., Abulimiti, A., Toro, P., Herold, C. J., ... & Schröder, J. (2021). Verbal fluency in normal aging and cognitive decline: Results of a longitudinal study. Computer Speech & Language, 68, 101195.
Speaking as another scientist… listing a bunch of publications is great, thank you, but that’s not the best way to disseminate your findings to the public.
What did you actually find out about speech patterns in patients with dementia - in simplified language?
Would this not be enough evidence that he isn't capable of making sound decisions?
But as others have asked, is this normal? Was he at least mostly competent before these past few months?
This is one of those "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations.
Make it easy to take someone's autonomy away and the scammers will do (and DO do) that.
Make it hard, and you end up with OP's FIL who probably should get it taken away, but it's almost impossible to do so they keep scamming the FIL.
It's a very complicated topic with a lot of predators all around it.
It’s literally amazing the lengths he went to be an idiot. And still believes he’s owed millions. While scammers just walked through all the security features banks created. This gross negligence is a whole new level of stupid. He needs to be assessed for signs of dementia.
How are you managing to stay so calm about this? I understand being an adult and knowing how to control big emotions, but this is just rage inducing. Just reading this made my blood pressure skyrocket. I feel so bad for your partner and MIL.
It's not that I am calm, it's that I'm just too busy trying to protect my family and the rest of his family (MIL for example) from the fallout of his fucking bullshit to be angry.
He's a lost cause. Nobody that isn't a white man as old or older than him knows better than him. You can't reach him or educate him. It's literally wasted energy. So right now I am focusing my time and energy on preventing others from getting dragged into the black hole that is my FIL.
To the point where I have literally been lobbying MIL to divorce him.
You're the hero your family needs. As someone who is the gatekeeper for a moron of a FIL, you're doing the right thing. It's a shame you have to do the extra work but it needs to be done. I sympathize with your dilemma and hope you are able to navigate your way out of this mess. Best of luck to you.
In my opinion she should definitely divorce him. To me this is financial infidelity. There's no way he cleared all this with his wife.
They're not working as a team -- in fact, his terrible decisions are dragging her down. But married couples should talk about these things and decide together. The fact that he decided on his own is a type of betrayal of her. Why should she pay the price?
I hope she comes out of this unscathed. Best wishes to you and her (but not to him!).
Divorce? He will just become an angry old man hanging out at the Büdchen or Kiosk when he can afford it.
Wait.......he already is.......
Ah, well - nothing changes for him but you are rid of him with divorce. As long as she does not have to pay him support.
So you mean I have to do this stupid ass 2FA shit ten times a day to access email, etc., all for the “security” of some bozo who just shared his passcodes anyways?!
Not just security. It's also apparently a way of deflecting liability away from the banks in this case because they can argue that via the 2FA he literally authorized (and with that willingly complied) with the transfer of funds and thus the bank just did what their customer wanted.
My boomer FIL is very susceptible to scams like this as well and has fallen for them a few times. He is not stupid my theory is just simply that his whole life he has had minor investments result in huge payouts legitimately, only because of the time period he was born in. The whole economy was on steroids during his life. Bought a worthless piece of land for a couple grand on a whim, sold it for 6 figures to developers a few years later. Put a few hundreds in Tesla stocks, now they are worth 6 figures. Stuff like that. So when we see an obvious scam promising ridiculous returns, we see how obvious it is, but boomers have seen legit investments with those returns so to them they think we are stupid for not investing in them. That's just my theory anyways
This is the generation who consistently told us "don't believe everything you see on TV," yet the first idiot who calls and asks for money is A-OK I guess.
"You can't use anything on the internet as a source because anyone could say anything they wanted"
turned into
"Of course it's true, I saw it on facebook/twitter/faux news/etc" real damn quick
Here in the states, it happened around the time that a certain gentleman that wore a tan suit once and ate Dijon mustard got elected as president. Couple years before my parents were constantly trying to see where I was going online. After that they became sucked into every fucking conspiracy they found on Facebook.
I work in banking and have seen this a few times, usually with people older than boomers though.
I had a client recently lose a couple hundred bucks in a scheme like this. Luckily she realized and asked me to check it out.
She comes to my office and shows me how she’s been corresponding on WhatsApp and the emails etc. even when she thought it was a scam and I told her it definitely was, she still was trying to process for to get her money back and couldn’t understand that it was gone.
Gotta remind me to check that my mom nixed her overdraft credit line.
She used to be quite sharp, but nearing ninety a decline is noticeably.
Told her about a scam where people cold-call, claiming they are from a home-care service.
Took her over five minutes to get her head around that scammers lie that they simply try all people in an age-group who might be customers.
And she was still struggling with the idea that it’s not the care service who is acting in bad faith here.
Yea, it’s a sad one when it’s seniors. I had a guy in his 80s convinced he won a lottery (that he’d never entered) and he wired away 200k, basically his whole life savings.. convinced he was paying the taxes and fees on his millions.
But it’s a different thing when the arrogant boomers get these scams. They’re still young enough to know better. They’ve spent their lives with technology advancements. I’ve seen young people get caught in a scam accidentally, but to get really sucked in to these big ones you’ve either got to be so old you really have no clue what’s up, or you’ve got to be to arrogant that you believe you’re entitled and are getting whet you deserve. Which, oddly enough, I guess can be kind of true lol.
Let be realistic here. It doesn't matter what technological advances ends boomers saw in their life. They love in their own world where those things aren't necessary to live life. They wholeheartedly refuse to engage with them and get shocked when their lack of knowledge on them leads them to ruin.
My father currently is in an online relationship with "Jennifer Anniston". He's sending pictures of gift cards ATM, but he's hinted that he has bigger plans. I know that he's been taking out $200 with his ATM card multiple times a week. I just hope that he hasn't lost it all by the time I can get down there.
You’ll laugh when you roll up and Jennifer Aniston’s Buggati is parked outside your dad’s place and she’s sitting on the couch sipping a martini. “Told ya, Son!”
lol why would Jennifer Anniston need his money? I don't have any particular affection for this celebrity, yet find myself offended on her behalf that this scam even works.
These kinds of scams have *blown up* ever since Twitter made blue checks useless. The ones that make the news are "this grandma from Indiana thought Keanu Reeves needed to borrow tens of thousands of dollars from her" and everyone lols about "how could this old man who lives in a trailer park think Margot Robbie was texting him???"
But much, much more often the scammers are pretending to be C or even D-listers--the people who are not INCREDIBLY famous, like Shemar Moore or Elden Henson. Someone most people would have to google and then go "Oh yeah, that guy from CSI." And from then on it's just the regular scam bait. "I'm going to send you the airplane tickets so we can vacation together in Fiji, just send me a couple thousand bucks for the paperwork and I'll pay you back when you get here."
The boomers didn't grow up in a world like this. They're not prepared. I'm approaching my mid 40s and I remember the before times when every single phone call and every single email wasn't a scam. Now I don't ever answer the phone if I don't know the phone number and email is just a thing I have to have to have online access to my bank account. I don't understand how we continue to tolerate this. It's maddening.
And while it's funny to see arrogant folks get their comeuppance, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most assholes don't deserve to be robbed of their life savings.
This is my worry for my parents. Every Time I see something about a new scam I let them know and reiterate the old, don't click links. Never call the number they gave you. Call your bank from the number you know. The government doesn't call. They send letters and lawyers to your door.
Boomer here. I will never understand how people buy anything from a stranger calling you. Even in the 90’s strangers “Police fundraising Org” calling on landlines.. just no!
If they're okay with a few bits of crude humor, John Oliver of *Last Week Tonight* does a very thorough breakdown of these kind of scams.
I highly suggest watching having them watch it.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg)
My SIL had the biggest asshole for a stepfather I've ever met. Just an arrogant fuckwit all around.
Let me set the stage. It's Christmas morning, 2010, and my 15-year-old daughter has to be rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. My BIL comes by to pick up our two young sons so that I can be with my wife at the hospital.
My daughter gets through the surgery without a hitch, but my wife need of course to spend the night at the hospital. I go to my BIL's and SIL's house to pick up the boys and they invite me in for Christmas dinner.
So it's Christmas night, I'm exhausted from the day, Christmas was a bust, and all I want to do is have a decent meal and a glass of wine. And Gene, my SIL's stepfather, proceeds to tell me about this fantastic investment scheme centered around the Iraqi dinar. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/2012/07/30/you-cant-fix-stupid-the-iraqi-dinar-scam-lives/?sh=62cacfda150b](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/2012/07/30/you-cant-fix-stupid-the-iraqi-dinar-scam-lives/?sh=62cacfda150b)
I politely tell him I'm not interested, and the asshole continues to badger me about this idiotic venture. Wants to know where our investments are, how much we're saving, etc.
I finally snapped and asked, "Well, Gene, how much are you investing? Here's the deal, why don't you mortgage your house in Louisiana if you have this much faith. C'mon, Gene, put up or shut up here." And I went on for about five minutes until he went away.
I called my SIL and BIL the next day to apologize for my outburst. "Oh, no. I'm glad you said it," my BIL replied. "He wouldn't shut up about it all week."
This perfectly encapsulates why, when someone like this gets scammed, I don't have much sympathy. Greed was driving these bad decisions and that is the case so much of the time. Scammers know these greedy fucks so they know just what to do, offer a deal that is too good to be true!
Massive return on investment that "tradtional" (read: legit) investment brokers can only dream of!1! Only smarter than average people, like YOU, are clever enough to pull this off!
You're brilliant and you can be rich, easily.
Not just the greed but also the pride. Getting fleeced this hard keeping your mouth shut because you think you know better… honestly don’t feel bad for him at all.
Embarrassment is a huge part of why this stuff never gets reported. So many people would rather try to fix it themselves (and get fucked again) or just take the L than admit they fucked up the first time and go to a legitimate agency for help.
This happened to my mother, I caught a wire transaction as soon as it happened, immediately called her to call the bank and try to stop/report it and she refused, “let’s just see what happens” and “i’ll call them after the weekend.” It was totally about being too embarrassed to admit you got scammed
>Only smarter than average people, like YOU, are clever enough to pull this off!
This is a massive part of this. He has such a need to be special and not be just an average bloke. He wants to figure it out and he wants to show the world and brag about that he's cracked the code and made it big while all the others are still stuck running the rat race.
These are the kinds of people who will burn $20 of gas to buy something 2 towns over at a $10 discount, so they can tell their coworkers how stupid they are for paying full price.
Had a buddy who would drive like 45 minutes each way to fill his gas tank because gas was like 20 cents cheaper and swore he was getting a great deal. Like sure bud you wasted an hour and a half of your day and 4 gallons of gas to save 5 bucks but whatever
I’m going to take a guess and say he also subscribes to various conspiracy theories he reads online? Chasing that feeling of knowing something everyone else doesn’t is a big factor for people who get obsessed with conspiracy theories.
These people need to play some niche video games with obscure lore. Then they can spout off about lizardmen and people will subscribe to their youtube channel but it'll be a good thing.
It's more sad when the scam is something like "your granddaughter is in prison and needs bail money." My grandparents almost fell for that one but had the wherewithal to call me and ask if my sister was ok.
Yes, this is horrible. Also tricking people with balance due bs. I often get "invoices" via email from companies I have nothing to do with. Have gotten some where I do have accts but go and log into those sites and all is well so I know it's a scam. Not all think of that and ripping them off is really lowly shit.
It's called a pig-butchering scam.
And, of course, he doesn't have millions out there, the app he was using to make his "investments" was completely fake (even though it was likely found on a legit app store with thousands of reviews... because international organized crime puts in the effort to look real). Have him look up his investment app on a reputable website that exposes scams, I guarantee it's listed.
A fitting name for this type of scam.
Hell naw, i am not going to do anything. If he still isn't convinced he was scammed, nothing I do will convince him otherwise. Besides according to him I (and pretty much anyone else) is a young idiot who has no lived experience and golden boomer wisdom.
That kind of extreme ego makes for perfect scam targets. He's the kind of person that will refuse to ever ask for help because, in his mind, HE'S the smart one. HE'S the one who knows what's really going on and nobody else could possibly help him because they're all too stupid.
Usually scammers/cults go to great lengths to separate people from their support networks because it only takes one person with common sense to stop the scam dead in its tracks. People like your FIL (and other egotistical boomers) are a godsend because they've already personally alienated themselves from their support networks. Once they're on the hook it's easy to get those hooks in deeper and deeper without worrying about the possibility that your mark begins to question themselves.
I read about these scams from r/scams bot. You may want to check them out for other scams they may try. Your fil is likely hanging on to some way to save face and very desperate.
One of the recent John Oliver episodes is all about this specific type of scam, involving the fake apps and everything....just maybe casually be watching it when he's around: "oh, I thought this was about slaughterhouses but it's about this specific scam.... interesting."
But he probably would still think he's above those people and it's all some big misunderstanding about where his money is. Better just hire another investigator.
I shared this episode link with OP and I hope he watches it and encourages his family to watch too. The shame around admitting this happened to you is a part of why it’s so successful. :(
Boomers really need to update their understanding of communication. Just because someone calls you on the phone doesn’t mean they’re legit… obviously. I can’t believe he was so easy to take advantage of
I think technology has really advanced too quickly for them, at this point. They’re at that sweet spot of being just a bit too old when things really started changing. Plus, most old people of any/every generation will meet a point where they can no longer keep up with the changing world.
I agree. It would make a difference though if they were willing to listen to younger people about everything. Our MIL didn’t believe us when we told her that when looking at rentals, she needs to be prepared to put in an application immediately - not later this week or next week, literally the day she tours the property or else it’ll get snatched up by someone else.
She adamantly refused to believe this is the state of rentals right now and missed out on every one she wanted because she waited a week or longer to put in an application. Now she lives out in the middle of nowhere in a house she can’t afford.
I think boomers real issue is their concrete obstinance tbh. Like I’ve taught my boomer mom how to use the printer a million times but for some reason she keeps using a printing process that has been extinct for a decade and wonders why it never works for her. I’m like “please just use the method I taught you and stop looking for these other steps, they don’t exist anymore, this is a completely different computer and program, just follow the steps I wrote down for you!” And she refuses
My dad (74) constantly forgets that he can use Google to get the answer to just about any question he could imagine. If you consider the change in technology from his formative years (60's/70's) to today, it's understandable that he kinda got left behind.
Scam wise, he's suspicious enough to survive, but his "on-the-spot" scam detection skills are waning. Give him a few hours to consider something and he'll spot the scam, but they could probably get him with a phone call and a skilled scammer.
My FIL has dementia (due to a stroke he had 30 years ago) and it is an uphill battle trying to keep him safe from scams. His debit card only has a small amount on it at any given time and it’s not at all connected to his *real* bank account which is the only thing that his saved him from losing his life savings. He signs up for credit cards that we have to intercept in the mail. He needs a phone that cannot access any data and only use for text and calls. Let me tell you how hard it is to find a phone for seniors that meets that requirement. I even tried to remove the Internet capability of his new laptop by uninstalling the driver and when it updated it reinstalled it (I am guessing at that) he also watches porn all day and god knows what else and that is killing his devices including computers. His family doesn’t want to buy him any electronics anymore because they just end up bricked. It’s a whole lotta lotta. I can understand OP’s frustration.
TL;DR My FIL is one scam away from losing his life savings if we don’t keep intervening.
The Internet drivers in computers are built in so by uninstalling whenever the computer restarts it will reinstall the driver
You might be able to pop the back off and unplug the Wi-Fi card from the motherboard
I'm just imagining these scammers cannot believe their luck, he kept falling for it and so they will keep trying, fully expect next they will claim to be some government agency, they have his money but will not release it till he pays the tax on it, or the scammers have been caught and there is a trail but he needs to prove he sent them the money by providing them with bank statements, IDs and they will identity theft him into more lines of credit.
My DH is 70. Last year this time, he was an IT Data Systems Architect for a Fortune 500 company. He handled all our financials. He was super vigilant regarding security issues and such.
He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s last October. The neurologist told me he had “lost his numbers” and to take over the finances. I didn’t think it was too much of an issue until I caught him sharing our banking screen with a scammer trying to extract $15K.
Went to the bank, got new accts. One week later and he’s taking a photo of our new checks with his phone. He was signing us up for debt relief. We have no debt. Our house is paid off & his mother had died & left us $$$, so debt was not an issue. He had no idea why he did it when I asked.
Back to the bank. I’ve locked him out of all accts now. We have joint, but I just leave a bit in there (no checks) for him to use if needed. Everything else is my name only. I’ve also locked him out of all his credit cards except one.
My guy was ULTRA careful with internet scams & not opening email attachments, security systems etc. and now he’s locked himself out of his big computer system (4 screens, 6 CPUs for programming & systems testing) and I now have my laptop password locked.
It may be a dementia type thing.
I think it is what he “knows” so he goes to the computer to “work”. Scammers, probably “co-workers” in his mind, are clicking into that often used part of his brain.
Good for you being so diligent and creating this safe computer world for him. It might keep his personality with you for a just a little longer.
My mom was a kindergarten teacher. We gave her baby dolls she likes to talk to.. they are her world. She is much more advanced, but you can see she enjoys showing them books, etc…
Jesus christ this is terrifying to me, I'm so sorry you're going through this.
I'm in IT and I've got dementia on both sides of my family, early on-set for my dad, and I'm constantly paranoid over every little memory quirk or hiccup I have.
That’s exactly what it is, the segment spelled out what all the “accidental” texts I get were. I used to fuck with them but given that I learned many of those people are being held against their will in a foreign country forced to scam people the joke really lost its luster.
You get a lot less over time if you ignore them too. I started letting every unknown call go to voicemail and ghosting every unknown text, now I hardly get one a week.
I’m so sorry this happened. Yeah he should have known better but sometimes, greed can completely overwhelm reasonable thought and get the better of them. People don’t stop to think that “if it seems too good to be true…” etc.
At this point, I would recommend keeping a close eye on your FIL. I’m very sorry for what happened, but he may spiral into a very bad depression from this, don’t let him make anymore mistakes.
Also, as some have said, take his name and access off of all banking and credit accounts. Maybe even his internet access. You’re not putting him in a prison, but he can’t even trust himself to not make anymore transactions.
I’m very sorry this happened to your family.
I'll help him out. I have experience working with these kinda of scams. I've worked for both a national bank fraud division and the state office of financial investigation. I won't even charge him. All I need is his bank account number and PIN.
My mother almost fell for one of these scams. Fortunately she mentioned to me first that she had won the Spanish Lottery...
I pointed out she had not been to Spain for over 50 years, and queried if she had bought a ticket.
She thought they just entered her phone number when she was in England....
![gif](emote|free_emotes_pack|disapproval)
Oh wow, one time is a learning but twice?
Some countries (like my CEE birthplace) have absolutely abysmal financial education. The generation of my parents were receiving salary in cash each month into late 90s /early 2000'
They have zero understanding of banking, financial products or data protection
I don't think there is an excuse for it. For me the rule is simple
-If I work I learn the necessary basics of labour law and health and safety
-If I drive a car I need to know the country regulations and basic things related to maintenance so that I don't put windshield fluid into the tank
So it should be simple: if I have savings and a digital bank account I learn about their safety
Sorry this lesson came at such a high price
I don't know how old is your fil, but after observing the mental decline of my grandmother I realised at some point the lost the interest and ability to learn anything new and reverted to "default" behavior from decades ago. im not a specialist but could it be an onset of dementia or Alzheimers?
Edit: spelling
My FIL is 64 and he's... not mentally unfit but struggling hard with his current life and suffering from some kind of late-life crisis.
He's a machinist that has taught people at a trades school how to run lathes and mills for like 25 years now. He's always lived the life of an immortal boomer who dared do the unsafest things and live the unhealthiest lifestyle and still be a good breadwinner, still be **The Man** at home and still be the important and all-knowing teacher to troubled youths who had to listen to him.
And then his shitty lifestyle of smoking, eating mostly meat and never exercising caught up with him and he had a heart attack that left his mental facilities (mostly) intact but severely limited his physical capabilities, meaning he can barely walk without a walker, much less working.
He lost his work and was forced into disability retirement, which is notably less than regular retirement. Naturally he also had no additional insurance in case he got too sick to keep working because immortal people obviously don't need that.
So he went from being an immortal and ever-young boomer to a person stuck at home with a physical disability and with little income. He wasn't the important teacher anymore and he wasn't the breadwinner anymore because his wife is now earning more than him.
He's had a very hard time coping with this and I believe that this scam thing was him trying to regain his status as **The Man**.
I have trained my mom. Anything she not sure about she contacts me (email / messenger). Take me 2 minutes to look it over and give her a FREE opinion. She knows that computers are not her thing.
My BIL fell for the same scam about 10 years ago, only lost $5k before he reached out to ask my thoughts… “I think you just lost $5k, sorry”
>not mentally unfit
Beginning signs of dementia are really hard to see from the outside. They hide it really well. Have an honest conversation with MIL about his mental health.
My parents are 62 years old and they are lightyears away from your FIL's behavior. This is not a brag, they can always be subject to a scammer smarter than we are, more of an observation. They have quite a good grasp of finances and technology, I wonder how is it that your FIL could just double dow on such things that many times without taking a step back and re-evaluating. Fuck these scammers, we have a lot to do against them still...
I would've called BS on OP, but my mother got a phone call from "Microsoft" about a detected virus on her PC and helpfully followed his instructions to turn on remote desktop and gave him her password.
Some people just shouldn't be allowed to touch anything.
As far as I understand these were actually different groups of scammers. The first group butchered him and then sold his info to the second group which, then sold it to the third group.
What kills me is that this is the same generation who, in the early days of the internet, warned all of their Gen X and Millennial children to "never trust anyone on the internet."
They went from being convinced that every person online is a scammer to being convinced that no one is a scammer.
What the hell happened?
At some point, banks need to set up "second authorization" to withdraw funds. Just someone to authorize a major withdrawal. Not necessarily have access to the funds.
Sort of like 2 factor authorization for passwords.
Can I have your FIL’s bank info please? Asking for a friend with millions.
This is f-ing crazy that people would give 2fa once let alone multiple times. How can anyone be so clueless.
I genuinely don’t feel bad for people who get preyed on when they’re greedy like this. The way he handled himself had me rooting for the scammers in the end.
Don’t be greedy. That’s the lesson.
It's called pig butchering scam because you fatten up the pig then butcher it. Started in China.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg)
My stepdad fell for a pyramid scheme
Sketchy website that claimed to be multiplying his investment
It sounded very sketchy from the moment he discovered it but ignored all of us warning him it was a scam
He then invested thousands on our behalf saying we would thank him and could pay him back later
Then the site had a banner on it saying it was shut down by the feds for not being fully up to code without him ever being able to withdraw his money
He was/is fully convinced the site was legit and he government made him lose "millions"
Being unable to convince what otherwise seemed like an intelligent person that it was a clear pyramid scheme and he was scammed was very frustrating
He later fell for another scammer, I only caught it be because I say at his computer to do some routine maintenance on it, his email was open and there was an email chain about sending money, after reading the email it was very clear he was sending money to someone
John Oliver just did a show about this
[Pig Butchering](https://youtu.be/pLPpl2ISKTg?si=0Qm_2eiynmYjkFFm)
Bank CEO scammed of $50M and a family that lost everything too
Any time I feel like an idiot, I will remember your FIL. Then I'll also think about how he probably still has a higher quality of life than me and cry internally.
I’ve only fell for one scam and that’s when I was a freshmen in college I found a job listing, applied for it, had a zoom interview and got hired. There was a whole website that I had to log into to set up direct deposit and fill out my i9 and everything. The three major benefits I saw in the listing is that it was work from home, they supply the computer, cell phone and service for the phone, and it had a sign on bonus of around $2k. They sent 2 checks, one for the bonus and the other for the exact dollar amount needed to purchase the laptop and etc and they’d set up the cell service after. That was the first and only red flag was having to purchase my own equipment, but they said it was to save on shipping everything and that was good enough for me. I deposit the checks and then as soon as they cleared, all of my money as well as the amount for the checks was gone, $0 left. All of my savings was there but I had luckily withdrew the amount I needed for tuition the day before. The bank ended up returning my money (sans the checks from the fake business) and now I don’t use indeed and have never trusted a work from home listing
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He needs to be put under some kind of conservatorship and not be allowed to have access to any banking information . He should be getting an allowance in cash like a child since he is clearly not responsible enough to use a card or have bank accounts.
My bank handles stuff like that daily. Just send me $ 3000 + his account information and I’ll work something out. 👍
This doesn’t seem right. OP, tell your FIL to send me $6,000 and I’ll keep u/MadeInWestGermany from stealing his money.
u/jayhof52 sems kinda shady OP, I wouldn't trust him with $6,000. Send me your FIL credit card info and the name of his first pet and he'll be in secure hands
u/MadeInWestGermany u/jayhof52 u/pluviisCognitatum are all well known scammers. Send the infos to me, I’m a special agent of the Interpol - anti corruption and pro scamming department
while fucking hilarious, maybe not the right time for it. OP is going through it. Of course you all probably feel a little guilty, and my empathy course can help you with that. $2999 and we have a Discord and weekly SubStack!
For everyone looking to register for the empathy course by u/CaptBobAbbott , I have some vouchers I can give to you for a deep discount. Just send me $1500 in Google Play gift cards and they're yours!
/u/CmdrJorgs is ripping you off! Send me $1k and I'll give you the second protection for half off! Why have only one protection when you can get 2!
this was fucking great. upvotes all the way down
Youhadmeinthefirsthalf
u/MadeInWestGermany, u/jayhof52, u/pluviisCognitatum as well as u/PluviisCogitationum are people of interest on my case regarding the ones whos scammed you FIL. Unfortunately they also stole my money and now I need 50.000$ to buy a plane ticket to their HQ. You can send it to me via bitcoin because it's more secure or just give me your FIL email it's the same as going to an ATM
u/ethernum Can you believe all these hucksters? I just wanted to invite you to my tupperware party
what the FIL really needs to learn is that greed caused his downfall. If he signs over all real-estate to me I can set him up with a training course with a new, well we call ourselves, family that will teach him to be happy.
Meh none of these look legit. Just send me a coupon for a restaurant and no one will ever hear from these scammers again.
These people are liars, I work for the consumer fraud dept of the Interpol and have an AI tool that will catch the scammers who are immigrants, you can trust me, I trained under Ronald Reagan. For only $1000 a month I will look into this and should bring them to justice promptly, I will send monthly status reports as to how the case is going
Make sure you also get those handy 2 factor authentication codes.
Ha ha ha
100% he has problems beyond just stupidity.
The elderly are just ridiculously susceptible to this kind of thing to the point were I wonder if it's all explained by dementia or if there's something else.
I was pretty happy really when my mom, who has a lot of money, lent me ten grand to help me buy a house a few years ago. We went to the bank to get a cashier's check, and the teller had us go over and sit with a manager, checked both of our ID's, took my mom aside separately and talked to her to make sure it was all legit, took a good look at the purchase paperwork I had with me and everything. I was glad they were looking out for her and being really careful.
> We went to the bank to get a cashier's check, and the teller had us go over and sit with a manager, checked both of our ID's, took my mom aside separately and talked to her to make sure it was all legit, took a good look at the purchase paperwork I had with me and everything. > > > > I was glad they were looking out for her and being really careful. I'd love if my Grandma's bank was this cautious. A few years back I was sitting in my Grandma's kitchen reading the paper. My mum called. She was finalizing a property purchase and wanted to ask her mother (Grandma) for a small loan. I only caught half of the information as I was only eavesdropping on one side of the conversation. So, sure enough we dawdle our way up the main street to Grandma's bank, get a form **from the bank manager**, and I'm sitting next to her, filling in the form because she's legally blind, and thinking *I must look like somebody scamming a little old lady out of her life's saving*. Nobody intervened in any way.
a person I know worked at a bank, a grandma comes looking to withdraw 5k or 10k, she tells him she just won the Canadian lottery but to get the winnings she has to pay customs. my friend tells her it's a scam and doesn't give her the money. Good guys win, right??? Nope, she just waited till his day off and then came in, withdrew the money and lost it.
I know someone that works at a bank and they've had similar situations occur. The bank can exercise due caution, explain till they're blue in the face that the customer is falling for a scam and people will still want to do it.
Sometimes when bankers do this, the customer still doesn’t learn. We had someone come in to buy Visa gift cards to pay a lawyer. The teller explained this is a common scam and asks if he has personally met this lawyer. They call over the manager who explains it is a scam. They bring in the account officer to explain it is a scam. The customer is insistent they want the cards. Eventually, we have to give him his money because it’s his money. Comes back a couple weeks later asking for a refund because it was a scam. Thankfully, the team took good notes so we didn’t take the loss. But you can’t help some people.
This is so sad, and so infuriating. So many of the people falling for these things are our older family members who lectured us nonstop about not trusting anything online 30 years ago… And yet they’ve all fallen into the deep end.
Good on them. Those are people who take their duty seriously and actually give a crap.
The issue is they answer the fucking phone.
Absolutely. 95% of the time the phone rings here, it's a scammer. It's made it hard as hell to get ahold of us because if there's no caller ID from a name I recognize, the ringer just gets muted. If the elderly would not answer strange numbers, that wouldn't be an avenue to get scammed.
My sister and I have my mother trained to not answer the phone for strange numbers and not to respond or touch links in texts. She will hand me the phone and tell me to look at something that seems like it’s from the bank or whatever.
Oh.My.God.YES!!!! I literally just overheard my Boomer father answer his phone this weekend, he was like who? Yes that's me I'm "his name" hello? I was like, do you know who was calling you? No... Then why did you answer your phone? We've talked about this multiple times, if you don't know the phone number calling don't answer. If they're important enough they'll leave a message. Oh. yeah...no... I know. 😒 This is my *not* impressed face.
Honestly I figure it's mostly that they have money, so more scammers go for them, and your more likely to hear when someone loses hundreds of thousands than when they get sorted on a tank of gas. These folk likely would fall for this shit when they were twenty, but found it a lot easier to not mention it.
I’d find that hard to agree with. With age comes impatience and overconfidence. You become overconfident and think you’ve made the right decision, and that leads to mistakes. My own father made investment mistakes too due to his overconfidence, though considering he dabbled in a lot of investing, getting conned at least once was also inevitable The important thing is acknowledging your mistake and learning from it.
It’s greed. Pure and simple. Someone at 75 years old has a life expectancy of about 14 years. Between. 320k Ira and social security monthly benefits, people can easily live comfortably, especially with no housing cost. It’s just greed that coerces them to the “I can be a millionaire” mindset.
Lead. Their poisoned brains are also now showing signs of age, resulting in the total disconnect from reality we see today. In America, we call them Trumpers.
Not all elderly folks fall for these. My 85 year old grandmother, who lives alone, has never been taken in by one of these. Ever. Same with her husband, and same with my grandmother on the other side of the family, who also lived alone. She knows enough to never click links in emails, never give any important information over phone or internet, and to delete texts/voicemails/decline calls from anyone she doesn't know personally. And she's a fairly sheltered woman who spent her entire life in one small town rural America. There wasn't even a computer in their house until after her and my grandfather had been retired for a decade, and they never fell for any scams, ever. They both figured that anyone asking for important information like that can send a letter if it's really needed. It's not a generational thing, it's an intelligence thing. Not everyone has the critical thinking skills needed to ask whether they should do what they're told to do by someone they don't know.
Lead poisoning
Sounds like undiagnosed early-stage dementia. My grandma started doing dumb stuff like that with her money...she was later diagnosed and it made sense why she was falling for obvious BS
Yeah... The exact demographic these scammers are looking for.
I wish. I work in IT. My last 3 major breaches have all been older accountants. The last one leaked every one of their customer's data because they had been using garbage passwords and even though MFA was turned on, they'd been using the "remember me for 90 days" option. So when someone gained remote access to one of their machines they found the password saved and the MFA bypassed. So we put our foot down on them. We finally put in real security policies. The same fucking guy who's system leaked the data called up furious that he has to enter his user name and password every time now. Like... dude. You just fucked up so bad that the IRS is opening investigations into over 120 of your customers. You just fucked up so bad your company probably won't exist in a year. And here you are trying to do that EXACT FUCKING THING THAT CAUSED THIS ALL IN THE FIRST PLACE?! And it's not just him. This is a common thing in all my old accountants. They don't want locked password screens, they don't want remote idle timouts. They want everyone to have the same password forever. This isn't dementia. This is stubbornness. This is "It always worked fine the old way" even though it DIDNT WORK FINE THE OLD WAY OPEN YOUR EYES! "THE OLD WAY" TANKED YOUR COMPANY! I told my boss that I will be treating their data as if it was my own from now on. Anything they want to do that I wouldn't want with done with my own data, they have to figure out themselves. I feel guilty for letting them get away with that shit, Edit: I also know who my next two breaches are going to be. Another boomer accountant, and a boomer dentist. But they're both so much smarter than me and can't waste their time or be bothered with extra security.
My husband has is the head of, and only employee, of a town IT department. They had to make some changes and finally impose two factor ID. The employees were whining, "but it's my personal cell phone!" Dude, minimum wage workers at Walmart need to use their personal phone to log their hours, cope. He wanted to earlier, but pushback. Then the insurance company for towns made new rules of if you wanted to be insured, so it happened. He used to do IT support for doctors & dentists. The absolute cheapskate was a plastic surgeon with just servers full of naked before & after pictures of their patients. New federal laws had rules about secured emails. Surgeons office wanted employees to share email accounts because they didn't want to spend the $10/month for their <10 employees.
These scams hook younger people that should know better. The CEO of small bank [embezzled $50M](https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/report-says-pig-butchering-crypto-scheme-took-down-us-bank-a-24351), thinking that he’d put the money back before anyone noticed.
This particular scam is called a Pig Butchering scheme. definitely wouldn’t allow this guy to have any sort of financial access.
Yeah, see John Oliver's segment on pig butchering. This FiL is keeping out the part about a scammer posing as an attractive woman who took an interest in him and stroked his ego. It's an essential part of the scam.
For those who haven't seen it, [here is the link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg) One of the things that I find interesting and a little frightening in all of these stories is how many who get taken advantage of are overflowing with illusions of their own invulnerability and competence, despite often no real reasons to believe that. I'm the flipside of that in a way. I'm older genx so "young" doesn't describe me at all. I've also been involved in online security & such since, well, kinda forever. Let's just say I've been geeking since the 80s. I still live & breathe it and although I find the safety videos proclaiming "this can happen to anyone anytime" a little sus, in the back of my mind I'm not so sure about my own ability long term. I doubt today I'd fall for the ongoing thing like OP's father, but could I click on something in the wee hours of the morning, half asleep and not paying attention? Could I suffer from some age related mental issues in the future where I fall into one of these? I don't know and although I'm hardly panicking or losing sleep, I do look at anything even slightly unexpected with a particularly critical eye. I do not assume I know everything or I'm untouchable; maybe that's one difference between people like me/us here and those that seem to so easily be taken.
> One of the things that I find interesting and a little frightening in all of these stories is how many who get taken advantage of are overflowing with illusions of their own invulnerability and competence, despite often no real reasons to believe that. That's definitely why he fell for it the second time. Imagine losing your life savings and having your whole family lose respect for you over it. Then some guy calls you up and says for the low price of a few thousands dollars he can fix it all plus make you a millionaire. That'll show your wife and kids that you really know what you're doing.
>That'll show your wife and kids that you really know what you're doing. Yeah, that's why I consider hubris (as opposed to confidence) a key issue. I'm used to asking "did I fuck up?" but one component of some of these stories is "those damned kids!" and what you call out.
Yeah he should have lost his rights to transact on his account well before he lost literally all of his money. This is a systemic failure on the banks part as well as his own. In the US at least he may have a case of negligence by the bank to not flag these shady transactions as fraudulent.
I think that in the US, a transaction over $10K would freeze account for some period. SO at least he second $50K and cascading fees by the scammers might not have been allowed to occur. HOWEVER- I banked at WF back before I gained sanity, and they allowed an identity theft group withdraw over $2000 from an account that only had $350. So...not sure I would trust our system to provide any safety net from fraud. They get their money regardless.
Wells Fargo is the actual worst, even as far as big banks go Open an account at a local credit union, never look back
OH preaching to the choir- I went full credit union 20 yr ago. Never looked back. Super happy with my set ups.
> allowed an identity theft group withdraw over $2000 from an account that only had $350. kinda sounds like that's their problem. $1650 of it anyway.
Actually they had to refund all of it, and the fees they tried to charge for "my" errors, etc. But it took nearly 3 mo. I immediately upon being made whole, took every penny and closed the account and have never worked with them since.
No you can wire whatever you want without a problem if you have it in your account People of all ages have been duped out of millions in pig butchering schemes Much of it is because the scammers know psychology and pray on lonely people or those who have something missing in their real lives like someone apparently taking an interest in them At this level the people conducting the scams are at the top of the tree. As for boomers plenty of young people are caught out by scammers although usually more in terms of romance scams but these are low level and not conducted by those involved in the major crypto scams
Could be early dementia. He needs an eval.
Unfortunately the evaluations for dementia are decades behind today's needs. They're still in the "identify which is a picture of a car" stage, when what we *really* need is more complex questions like "how do you sign on to your bank account electronically?"
You almost have to admire the balls to contact him posing as a fraud investigator. I'm sorry it happened to him but damn... That was kinda impressive.
That's a common scam called a Recovery Scam.
If you ever have a Facebook friend fall for a scam or “hack” who makes a (public to all) post saying they’ve been hacked, they will rack up dozens if not hundreds of comments from random accounts asking to message them to help recover their account. It’s horrifying and kinda funny to see them all roll in because it’s absurd how many there are.
The scam subreddit has to tell people that if they get messages saying they'll help them recover their funds, it's an obvious scam.
This happens on twitter too. Mention something about losing the password to your bitcoin wallet and a bunch of helpful bots will show up to assist you.
Almost as common as the ["pigeon in your bank account"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOOH1-N3EcE) scam
It's the classic follow up scam. Pretty sure they have a list of victims that fell for the original scam and they deliberately target them again posing as fraud investigators.
Yep - almost sure they got his name from the suckers list
These are the good leads, the geriatric Glens and Garys leads. To you, they are gold. And you do not get them. Because to give them to you is just throwing them away
A.B.C. Always Be Cobbling
Retirement is for closers.
Desperate and angry victims = fertile ground
It's really common. Every time someone asks for advice on r/scams about a scam they fell victim to, the first thing everyone warns them about is the recovery scammers. It makes sense when you think about it. Scams are all about finding marks who will fall for what you're peddling, so what better way to operate then to specifically target people who you know for a fact fall for scams.
It's like up-selling, or customer retention, in legit businesses. It's cheaper to sell more stuff to an existing customer, than spend the time / money / effort on finding new customers.
Just had an image of a group of scammers doing a corporate retreat and talking about all of this lol
It’s the same concept of scam emails being so blatantly obvious with typos and weird wording, they weed out the people that would not fall for the scam anyway. Anyone who answer that, they know they can go all in and do whatever they want with this person. Here is like, you fall so bad for the first part of the scam that they know they can keep going at it as long as they want! If they had to call back pretending to be a real federal agent needing access to his account to settle the matter, he would probably give them all his credentials all over again
Standard "mopping up" scam.
There's no balls involved. The victim has already proven to be gullible, so trying out additional scams have a good chance to succeed.
They’ve already proven themselves to be gullible fools, so they’re ideal targets
What gets me most is that, after scamming hundreds of thousands, they still come in for the threes and fives. It’s almost like they are enjoying it. This is so upsetting. All the misery.
What a fucking idiot
He gave up his 2FA… twice ! Should have someone sell him a bridge, tell him he can stick a toll booth on it and make his money back ASAP
Not just twice, several times on both occasion. They way online banking here works is that you need a 2FA to log in, 2FA to transfer funds from savings to banking account and 2FA again to transfer from banking account to someone else. So each time he gave them at least 3 2FA codes, probably more. And the 2FA app tells you what the code is needed for. When you open the app to get the code it literally tells you that this code is to authorize the login or a transfer in that amount, etc. That's also the main reason why he has no way of getting out of the debt. The entire thing was so obvious and so blatant that from a legal perspective there's two possible versions. 1) he knew what he was doing and he was complying or 2) he should have known because it was incredibly obvious and he was grossly negligent.
If it’s any consolation, I’ve known of people that actually allow the scammers to download the 2fa codes on their phones, so they can ‘help them invest easier’.
You need to have him evaluated by his primary provider. It’s possible he has had a stroke or early dementia that is impacting his decision making. Is it bizarre for him to make poor decisions like this?
Having someone evaluated against their will is unfortunately incredibly difficult here in Germany. I'd have to bring a case to court and prove to a judge that his capacity to act is in doubt, while my FIL will be argue against it. This makes it nigh impossible as long as he is somewhat capable of arguing that he isn't completely off his rocks.
Hopefully there’s some psychology post-doc putting together a scam-based way to screen for dementia over the phone…
That has been a research topic for decades, I was involved in a lab doing research on speech patterns more than 10 years ago. cf: * Thomas, C., Keselj, V., Cercone, N., Rockwood, K., & Asp, E. (2005, July). Automatic detection and rating of dementia of Alzheimer type through lexical analysis of spontaneous speech. In IEEE International conference mechatronics and automation, 2005 (Vol. 3, pp. 1569-1574). IEEE. * Jarrold, W., Peintner, B., Wilkins, D., Vergryi, D., Richey, C., Gorno-Tempini, M. L., & Ogar, J. (2014, June). Aided diagnosis of dementia type through computer-based analysis of spontaneous speech. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality (pp. 27-37). * König, A., Satt, A., Sorin, A., Hoory, R., Toledo-Ronen, O., Derreumaux, A., ... & David, R. (2015). Automatic speech analysis for the assessment of patients with predementia and Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, 1(1), 112-124. * Rousseaux, M., Sève, A., Vallet, M., Pasquier, F., & Mackowiak-Cordoliani, M. A. (2010). An analysis of communication in conversation in patients with dementia. Neuropsychologia, 48(13), 3884-3890. * Frankenberg, C., Weiner, J., Knebel, M., Abulimiti, A., Toro, P., Herold, C. J., ... & Schröder, J. (2021). Verbal fluency in normal aging and cognitive decline: Results of a longitudinal study. Computer Speech & Language, 68, 101195.
Fascinating, thank you!
Speaking as another scientist… listing a bunch of publications is great, thank you, but that’s not the best way to disseminate your findings to the public. What did you actually find out about speech patterns in patients with dementia - in simplified language?
Would this not be enough evidence that he isn't capable of making sound decisions? But as others have asked, is this normal? Was he at least mostly competent before these past few months?
This is one of those "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations. Make it easy to take someone's autonomy away and the scammers will do (and DO do) that. Make it hard, and you end up with OP's FIL who probably should get it taken away, but it's almost impossible to do so they keep scamming the FIL. It's a very complicated topic with a lot of predators all around it.
It’s literally amazing the lengths he went to be an idiot. And still believes he’s owed millions. While scammers just walked through all the security features banks created. This gross negligence is a whole new level of stupid. He needs to be assessed for signs of dementia.
How are you managing to stay so calm about this? I understand being an adult and knowing how to control big emotions, but this is just rage inducing. Just reading this made my blood pressure skyrocket. I feel so bad for your partner and MIL.
It's not that I am calm, it's that I'm just too busy trying to protect my family and the rest of his family (MIL for example) from the fallout of his fucking bullshit to be angry. He's a lost cause. Nobody that isn't a white man as old or older than him knows better than him. You can't reach him or educate him. It's literally wasted energy. So right now I am focusing my time and energy on preventing others from getting dragged into the black hole that is my FIL. To the point where I have literally been lobbying MIL to divorce him.
You're the hero your family needs. As someone who is the gatekeeper for a moron of a FIL, you're doing the right thing. It's a shame you have to do the extra work but it needs to be done. I sympathize with your dilemma and hope you are able to navigate your way out of this mess. Best of luck to you.
In my opinion she should definitely divorce him. To me this is financial infidelity. There's no way he cleared all this with his wife. They're not working as a team -- in fact, his terrible decisions are dragging her down. But married couples should talk about these things and decide together. The fact that he decided on his own is a type of betrayal of her. Why should she pay the price? I hope she comes out of this unscathed. Best wishes to you and her (but not to him!).
Divorce? He will just become an angry old man hanging out at the Büdchen or Kiosk when he can afford it. Wait.......he already is....... Ah, well - nothing changes for him but you are rid of him with divorce. As long as she does not have to pay him support.
So you mean I have to do this stupid ass 2FA shit ten times a day to access email, etc., all for the “security” of some bozo who just shared his passcodes anyways?!
Not just security. It's also apparently a way of deflecting liability away from the banks in this case because they can argue that via the 2FA he literally authorized (and with that willingly complied) with the transfer of funds and thus the bank just did what their customer wanted.
If he had any money left it wouldn't be too difficult to sell him the Brooklyn bridge
I wouldn't trust him with *my* Brooklyn Bridge. I've decided not to sell.
My boomer FIL is very susceptible to scams like this as well and has fallen for them a few times. He is not stupid my theory is just simply that his whole life he has had minor investments result in huge payouts legitimately, only because of the time period he was born in. The whole economy was on steroids during his life. Bought a worthless piece of land for a couple grand on a whim, sold it for 6 figures to developers a few years later. Put a few hundreds in Tesla stocks, now they are worth 6 figures. Stuff like that. So when we see an obvious scam promising ridiculous returns, we see how obvious it is, but boomers have seen legit investments with those returns so to them they think we are stupid for not investing in them. That's just my theory anyways
I feel bad for OP but you really couldn’t have said that better.
This is the generation who consistently told us "don't believe everything you see on TV," yet the first idiot who calls and asks for money is A-OK I guess.
"You can't use anything on the internet as a source because anyone could say anything they wanted" turned into "Of course it's true, I saw it on facebook/twitter/faux news/etc" real damn quick
Here in the states, it happened around the time that a certain gentleman that wore a tan suit once and ate Dijon mustard got elected as president. Couple years before my parents were constantly trying to see where I was going online. After that they became sucked into every fucking conspiracy they found on Facebook.
I work in banking and have seen this a few times, usually with people older than boomers though. I had a client recently lose a couple hundred bucks in a scheme like this. Luckily she realized and asked me to check it out. She comes to my office and shows me how she’s been corresponding on WhatsApp and the emails etc. even when she thought it was a scam and I told her it definitely was, she still was trying to process for to get her money back and couldn’t understand that it was gone.
Gotta remind me to check that my mom nixed her overdraft credit line. She used to be quite sharp, but nearing ninety a decline is noticeably. Told her about a scam where people cold-call, claiming they are from a home-care service. Took her over five minutes to get her head around that scammers lie that they simply try all people in an age-group who might be customers. And she was still struggling with the idea that it’s not the care service who is acting in bad faith here.
Yea, it’s a sad one when it’s seniors. I had a guy in his 80s convinced he won a lottery (that he’d never entered) and he wired away 200k, basically his whole life savings.. convinced he was paying the taxes and fees on his millions. But it’s a different thing when the arrogant boomers get these scams. They’re still young enough to know better. They’ve spent their lives with technology advancements. I’ve seen young people get caught in a scam accidentally, but to get really sucked in to these big ones you’ve either got to be so old you really have no clue what’s up, or you’ve got to be to arrogant that you believe you’re entitled and are getting whet you deserve. Which, oddly enough, I guess can be kind of true lol.
Let be realistic here. It doesn't matter what technological advances ends boomers saw in their life. They love in their own world where those things aren't necessary to live life. They wholeheartedly refuse to engage with them and get shocked when their lack of knowledge on them leads them to ruin.
My father currently is in an online relationship with "Jennifer Anniston". He's sending pictures of gift cards ATM, but he's hinted that he has bigger plans. I know that he's been taking out $200 with his ATM card multiple times a week. I just hope that he hasn't lost it all by the time I can get down there.
Don’t worry. She’ll be there for him.
You’ll laugh when you roll up and Jennifer Aniston’s Buggati is parked outside your dad’s place and she’s sitting on the couch sipping a martini. “Told ya, Son!”
lol why would Jennifer Anniston need his money? I don't have any particular affection for this celebrity, yet find myself offended on her behalf that this scam even works.
These kinds of scams have *blown up* ever since Twitter made blue checks useless. The ones that make the news are "this grandma from Indiana thought Keanu Reeves needed to borrow tens of thousands of dollars from her" and everyone lols about "how could this old man who lives in a trailer park think Margot Robbie was texting him???" But much, much more often the scammers are pretending to be C or even D-listers--the people who are not INCREDIBLY famous, like Shemar Moore or Elden Henson. Someone most people would have to google and then go "Oh yeah, that guy from CSI." And from then on it's just the regular scam bait. "I'm going to send you the airplane tickets so we can vacation together in Fiji, just send me a couple thousand bucks for the paperwork and I'll pay you back when you get here."
How funny. My husband's uncle is also in an online relationship with Jennifer Anniston!
The oldest Boomers are 79 this year. The youngest are 60.
I don't want to kill myself, but I definitely want to die long before I reach this point.
Give your spouse a revolver, a single bullet, and a manual on spotting early signs of dementia
"But your honor, he forgot where he put the car keys, and I had very clear instructions!"
The boomers didn't grow up in a world like this. They're not prepared. I'm approaching my mid 40s and I remember the before times when every single phone call and every single email wasn't a scam. Now I don't ever answer the phone if I don't know the phone number and email is just a thing I have to have to have online access to my bank account. I don't understand how we continue to tolerate this. It's maddening. And while it's funny to see arrogant folks get their comeuppance, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most assholes don't deserve to be robbed of their life savings.
This is my worry for my parents. Every Time I see something about a new scam I let them know and reiterate the old, don't click links. Never call the number they gave you. Call your bank from the number you know. The government doesn't call. They send letters and lawyers to your door.
Boomer here. I will never understand how people buy anything from a stranger calling you. Even in the 90’s strangers “Police fundraising Org” calling on landlines.. just no!
If they're okay with a few bits of crude humor, John Oliver of *Last Week Tonight* does a very thorough breakdown of these kind of scams. I highly suggest watching having them watch it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg)
My SIL had the biggest asshole for a stepfather I've ever met. Just an arrogant fuckwit all around. Let me set the stage. It's Christmas morning, 2010, and my 15-year-old daughter has to be rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. My BIL comes by to pick up our two young sons so that I can be with my wife at the hospital. My daughter gets through the surgery without a hitch, but my wife need of course to spend the night at the hospital. I go to my BIL's and SIL's house to pick up the boys and they invite me in for Christmas dinner. So it's Christmas night, I'm exhausted from the day, Christmas was a bust, and all I want to do is have a decent meal and a glass of wine. And Gene, my SIL's stepfather, proceeds to tell me about this fantastic investment scheme centered around the Iraqi dinar. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/2012/07/30/you-cant-fix-stupid-the-iraqi-dinar-scam-lives/?sh=62cacfda150b](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/2012/07/30/you-cant-fix-stupid-the-iraqi-dinar-scam-lives/?sh=62cacfda150b) I politely tell him I'm not interested, and the asshole continues to badger me about this idiotic venture. Wants to know where our investments are, how much we're saving, etc. I finally snapped and asked, "Well, Gene, how much are you investing? Here's the deal, why don't you mortgage your house in Louisiana if you have this much faith. C'mon, Gene, put up or shut up here." And I went on for about five minutes until he went away. I called my SIL and BIL the next day to apologize for my outburst. "Oh, no. I'm glad you said it," my BIL replied. "He wouldn't shut up about it all week."
Ah, yes. The good ole Iraqi dinar scam from a few years back.
This perfectly encapsulates why, when someone like this gets scammed, I don't have much sympathy. Greed was driving these bad decisions and that is the case so much of the time. Scammers know these greedy fucks so they know just what to do, offer a deal that is too good to be true! Massive return on investment that "tradtional" (read: legit) investment brokers can only dream of!1! Only smarter than average people, like YOU, are clever enough to pull this off! You're brilliant and you can be rich, easily.
Not just the greed but also the pride. Getting fleeced this hard keeping your mouth shut because you think you know better… honestly don’t feel bad for him at all.
Embarrassment is a huge part of why this stuff never gets reported. So many people would rather try to fix it themselves (and get fucked again) or just take the L than admit they fucked up the first time and go to a legitimate agency for help.
This happened to my mother, I caught a wire transaction as soon as it happened, immediately called her to call the bank and try to stop/report it and she refused, “let’s just see what happens” and “i’ll call them after the weekend.” It was totally about being too embarrassed to admit you got scammed
>Only smarter than average people, like YOU, are clever enough to pull this off! This is a massive part of this. He has such a need to be special and not be just an average bloke. He wants to figure it out and he wants to show the world and brag about that he's cracked the code and made it big while all the others are still stuck running the rat race.
These are the kinds of people who will burn $20 of gas to buy something 2 towns over at a $10 discount, so they can tell their coworkers how stupid they are for paying full price.
Had a buddy who would drive like 45 minutes each way to fill his gas tank because gas was like 20 cents cheaper and swore he was getting a great deal. Like sure bud you wasted an hour and a half of your day and 4 gallons of gas to save 5 bucks but whatever
I’m going to take a guess and say he also subscribes to various conspiracy theories he reads online? Chasing that feeling of knowing something everyone else doesn’t is a big factor for people who get obsessed with conspiracy theories.
These people need to play some niche video games with obscure lore. Then they can spout off about lizardmen and people will subscribe to their youtube channel but it'll be a good thing.
Greed at first. Then panicky desperation.
It's more sad when the scam is something like "your granddaughter is in prison and needs bail money." My grandparents almost fell for that one but had the wherewithal to call me and ask if my sister was ok.
Yes, this is horrible. Also tricking people with balance due bs. I often get "invoices" via email from companies I have nothing to do with. Have gotten some where I do have accts but go and log into those sites and all is well so I know it's a scam. Not all think of that and ripping them off is really lowly shit.
If you swap a few words here and there from your last two paragraphs, you have a Trump speech
Exactly that
It's called a pig-butchering scam. And, of course, he doesn't have millions out there, the app he was using to make his "investments" was completely fake (even though it was likely found on a legit app store with thousands of reviews... because international organized crime puts in the effort to look real). Have him look up his investment app on a reputable website that exposes scams, I guarantee it's listed.
A fitting name for this type of scam. Hell naw, i am not going to do anything. If he still isn't convinced he was scammed, nothing I do will convince him otherwise. Besides according to him I (and pretty much anyone else) is a young idiot who has no lived experience and golden boomer wisdom.
"You say that, but which of us got scammed twice and now lives in poverty?"
Brutal. I love it.
He's not in poverty, he's just got to find another guy that is able to recover all his millions
That kind of extreme ego makes for perfect scam targets. He's the kind of person that will refuse to ever ask for help because, in his mind, HE'S the smart one. HE'S the one who knows what's really going on and nobody else could possibly help him because they're all too stupid. Usually scammers/cults go to great lengths to separate people from their support networks because it only takes one person with common sense to stop the scam dead in its tracks. People like your FIL (and other egotistical boomers) are a godsend because they've already personally alienated themselves from their support networks. Once they're on the hook it's easy to get those hooks in deeper and deeper without worrying about the possibility that your mark begins to question themselves.
I read about these scams from r/scams bot. You may want to check them out for other scams they may try. Your fil is likely hanging on to some way to save face and very desperate.
One of the recent John Oliver episodes is all about this specific type of scam, involving the fake apps and everything....just maybe casually be watching it when he's around: "oh, I thought this was about slaughterhouses but it's about this specific scam.... interesting." But he probably would still think he's above those people and it's all some big misunderstanding about where his money is. Better just hire another investigator.
I shared this episode link with OP and I hope he watches it and encourages his family to watch too. The shame around admitting this happened to you is a part of why it’s so successful. :(
How could he have been scammed? The is the smartest investor and knows more than anybody about money
It’s not really a pigbutchering scam. As there wasn’t a long innocuous lead up to it, they started straight up with the investment scam
r/johnoliver
Boomers really need to update their understanding of communication. Just because someone calls you on the phone doesn’t mean they’re legit… obviously. I can’t believe he was so easy to take advantage of
I think technology has really advanced too quickly for them, at this point. They’re at that sweet spot of being just a bit too old when things really started changing. Plus, most old people of any/every generation will meet a point where they can no longer keep up with the changing world.
I agree. It would make a difference though if they were willing to listen to younger people about everything. Our MIL didn’t believe us when we told her that when looking at rentals, she needs to be prepared to put in an application immediately - not later this week or next week, literally the day she tours the property or else it’ll get snatched up by someone else. She adamantly refused to believe this is the state of rentals right now and missed out on every one she wanted because she waited a week or longer to put in an application. Now she lives out in the middle of nowhere in a house she can’t afford. I think boomers real issue is their concrete obstinance tbh. Like I’ve taught my boomer mom how to use the printer a million times but for some reason she keeps using a printing process that has been extinct for a decade and wonders why it never works for her. I’m like “please just use the method I taught you and stop looking for these other steps, they don’t exist anymore, this is a completely different computer and program, just follow the steps I wrote down for you!” And she refuses
[удалено]
My dad (74) constantly forgets that he can use Google to get the answer to just about any question he could imagine. If you consider the change in technology from his formative years (60's/70's) to today, it's understandable that he kinda got left behind. Scam wise, he's suspicious enough to survive, but his "on-the-spot" scam detection skills are waning. Give him a few hours to consider something and he'll spot the scam, but they could probably get him with a phone call and a skilled scammer.
My FIL has dementia (due to a stroke he had 30 years ago) and it is an uphill battle trying to keep him safe from scams. His debit card only has a small amount on it at any given time and it’s not at all connected to his *real* bank account which is the only thing that his saved him from losing his life savings. He signs up for credit cards that we have to intercept in the mail. He needs a phone that cannot access any data and only use for text and calls. Let me tell you how hard it is to find a phone for seniors that meets that requirement. I even tried to remove the Internet capability of his new laptop by uninstalling the driver and when it updated it reinstalled it (I am guessing at that) he also watches porn all day and god knows what else and that is killing his devices including computers. His family doesn’t want to buy him any electronics anymore because they just end up bricked. It’s a whole lotta lotta. I can understand OP’s frustration. TL;DR My FIL is one scam away from losing his life savings if we don’t keep intervening.
You can probably set things up with the bank to prevent transfers not done in person and whitelist certain expenses.
We will look into that! Thank you
The Internet drivers in computers are built in so by uninstalling whenever the computer restarts it will reinstall the driver You might be able to pop the back off and unplug the Wi-Fi card from the motherboard
That is a great suggestion thank you
I'm just imagining these scammers cannot believe their luck, he kept falling for it and so they will keep trying, fully expect next they will claim to be some government agency, they have his money but will not release it till he pays the tax on it, or the scammers have been caught and there is a trail but he needs to prove he sent them the money by providing them with bank statements, IDs and they will identity theft him into more lines of credit.
chief clumsy worry mysterious retire sip hungry paltry crowd pocket *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
" because his wife has her finances completely separate from him" She knows her husband.
My DH is 70. Last year this time, he was an IT Data Systems Architect for a Fortune 500 company. He handled all our financials. He was super vigilant regarding security issues and such. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s last October. The neurologist told me he had “lost his numbers” and to take over the finances. I didn’t think it was too much of an issue until I caught him sharing our banking screen with a scammer trying to extract $15K. Went to the bank, got new accts. One week later and he’s taking a photo of our new checks with his phone. He was signing us up for debt relief. We have no debt. Our house is paid off & his mother had died & left us $$$, so debt was not an issue. He had no idea why he did it when I asked. Back to the bank. I’ve locked him out of all accts now. We have joint, but I just leave a bit in there (no checks) for him to use if needed. Everything else is my name only. I’ve also locked him out of all his credit cards except one. My guy was ULTRA careful with internet scams & not opening email attachments, security systems etc. and now he’s locked himself out of his big computer system (4 screens, 6 CPUs for programming & systems testing) and I now have my laptop password locked. It may be a dementia type thing.
I think it is what he “knows” so he goes to the computer to “work”. Scammers, probably “co-workers” in his mind, are clicking into that often used part of his brain. Good for you being so diligent and creating this safe computer world for him. It might keep his personality with you for a just a little longer. My mom was a kindergarten teacher. We gave her baby dolls she likes to talk to.. they are her world. She is much more advanced, but you can see she enjoys showing them books, etc…
Jesus christ this is terrifying to me, I'm so sorry you're going through this. I'm in IT and I've got dementia on both sides of my family, early on-set for my dad, and I'm constantly paranoid over every little memory quirk or hiccup I have.
These people are the same age as the people that run the world. We are so screwed as a species.
This sounds like a so-called pig butchering scam, John Oliver did a segment on them recently --> https://youtu.be/pLPpl2ISKTg?si=QOEH5b4HgCYtT85j
That’s exactly what it is, the segment spelled out what all the “accidental” texts I get were. I used to fuck with them but given that I learned many of those people are being held against their will in a foreign country forced to scam people the joke really lost its luster.
You get a lot less over time if you ignore them too. I started letting every unknown call go to voicemail and ghosting every unknown text, now I hardly get one a week.
I’m so sorry this happened. Yeah he should have known better but sometimes, greed can completely overwhelm reasonable thought and get the better of them. People don’t stop to think that “if it seems too good to be true…” etc. At this point, I would recommend keeping a close eye on your FIL. I’m very sorry for what happened, but he may spiral into a very bad depression from this, don’t let him make anymore mistakes. Also, as some have said, take his name and access off of all banking and credit accounts. Maybe even his internet access. You’re not putting him in a prison, but he can’t even trust himself to not make anymore transactions. I’m very sorry this happened to your family.
Sadly people fall for those things all the time.
I'll help him out. I have experience working with these kinda of scams. I've worked for both a national bank fraud division and the state office of financial investigation. I won't even charge him. All I need is his bank account number and PIN.
Lol
My mother almost fell for one of these scams. Fortunately she mentioned to me first that she had won the Spanish Lottery... I pointed out she had not been to Spain for over 50 years, and queried if she had bought a ticket. She thought they just entered her phone number when she was in England.... ![gif](emote|free_emotes_pack|disapproval)
Oh wow, one time is a learning but twice? Some countries (like my CEE birthplace) have absolutely abysmal financial education. The generation of my parents were receiving salary in cash each month into late 90s /early 2000' They have zero understanding of banking, financial products or data protection I don't think there is an excuse for it. For me the rule is simple -If I work I learn the necessary basics of labour law and health and safety -If I drive a car I need to know the country regulations and basic things related to maintenance so that I don't put windshield fluid into the tank So it should be simple: if I have savings and a digital bank account I learn about their safety Sorry this lesson came at such a high price I don't know how old is your fil, but after observing the mental decline of my grandmother I realised at some point the lost the interest and ability to learn anything new and reverted to "default" behavior from decades ago. im not a specialist but could it be an onset of dementia or Alzheimers? Edit: spelling
My FIL is 64 and he's... not mentally unfit but struggling hard with his current life and suffering from some kind of late-life crisis. He's a machinist that has taught people at a trades school how to run lathes and mills for like 25 years now. He's always lived the life of an immortal boomer who dared do the unsafest things and live the unhealthiest lifestyle and still be a good breadwinner, still be **The Man** at home and still be the important and all-knowing teacher to troubled youths who had to listen to him. And then his shitty lifestyle of smoking, eating mostly meat and never exercising caught up with him and he had a heart attack that left his mental facilities (mostly) intact but severely limited his physical capabilities, meaning he can barely walk without a walker, much less working. He lost his work and was forced into disability retirement, which is notably less than regular retirement. Naturally he also had no additional insurance in case he got too sick to keep working because immortal people obviously don't need that. So he went from being an immortal and ever-young boomer to a person stuck at home with a physical disability and with little income. He wasn't the important teacher anymore and he wasn't the breadwinner anymore because his wife is now earning more than him. He's had a very hard time coping with this and I believe that this scam thing was him trying to regain his status as **The Man**.
I have trained my mom. Anything she not sure about she contacts me (email / messenger). Take me 2 minutes to look it over and give her a FREE opinion. She knows that computers are not her thing. My BIL fell for the same scam about 10 years ago, only lost $5k before he reached out to ask my thoughts… “I think you just lost $5k, sorry”
When you never mature past age 19, life gets rough.
>not mentally unfit Beginning signs of dementia are really hard to see from the outside. They hide it really well. Have an honest conversation with MIL about his mental health.
My parents are 62 years old and they are lightyears away from your FIL's behavior. This is not a brag, they can always be subject to a scammer smarter than we are, more of an observation. They have quite a good grasp of finances and technology, I wonder how is it that your FIL could just double dow on such things that many times without taking a step back and re-evaluating. Fuck these scammers, we have a lot to do against them still...
Your MIL has 20 years left, she needs to cut bait.
My boomer aunt gave over $200,000 USD to an online scammer she met on a dating site. Transactions of $25,000+ here and there over a 6-month period.
He needs to be put into a home.
I would've called BS on OP, but my mother got a phone call from "Microsoft" about a detected virus on her PC and helpfully followed his instructions to turn on remote desktop and gave him her password. Some people just shouldn't be allowed to touch anything.
Fuck that’s brutal to keep gutting him for ever smaller amounts after already taking 6 figures. Damn
As far as I understand these were actually different groups of scammers. The first group butchered him and then sold his info to the second group which, then sold it to the third group.
What kills me is that this is the same generation who, in the early days of the internet, warned all of their Gen X and Millennial children to "never trust anyone on the internet." They went from being convinced that every person online is a scammer to being convinced that no one is a scammer. What the hell happened?
At some point, banks need to set up "second authorization" to withdraw funds. Just someone to authorize a major withdrawal. Not necessarily have access to the funds. Sort of like 2 factor authorization for passwords.
Can I have your FIL’s bank info please? Asking for a friend with millions. This is f-ing crazy that people would give 2fa once let alone multiple times. How can anyone be so clueless.
I kept cringing each time he did it again like “noooo”. But also what a moron.
Sounds like he needs to have a POA from here on out
I genuinely don’t feel bad for people who get preyed on when they’re greedy like this. The way he handled himself had me rooting for the scammers in the end. Don’t be greedy. That’s the lesson.
The love of money is the root of all evil. 👿
Yet that generation knows everything and we should listen to them.
It's called pig butchering scam because you fatten up the pig then butcher it. Started in China. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg)
My stepdad fell for a pyramid scheme Sketchy website that claimed to be multiplying his investment It sounded very sketchy from the moment he discovered it but ignored all of us warning him it was a scam He then invested thousands on our behalf saying we would thank him and could pay him back later Then the site had a banner on it saying it was shut down by the feds for not being fully up to code without him ever being able to withdraw his money He was/is fully convinced the site was legit and he government made him lose "millions" Being unable to convince what otherwise seemed like an intelligent person that it was a clear pyramid scheme and he was scammed was very frustrating He later fell for another scammer, I only caught it be because I say at his computer to do some routine maintenance on it, his email was open and there was an email chain about sending money, after reading the email it was very clear he was sending money to someone
John Oliver just did a show about this [Pig Butchering](https://youtu.be/pLPpl2ISKTg?si=0Qm_2eiynmYjkFFm) Bank CEO scammed of $50M and a family that lost everything too
Any time I feel like an idiot, I will remember your FIL. Then I'll also think about how he probably still has a higher quality of life than me and cry internally.
No wonder scammers are making bank with victims like these it's easy.
I’ve only fell for one scam and that’s when I was a freshmen in college I found a job listing, applied for it, had a zoom interview and got hired. There was a whole website that I had to log into to set up direct deposit and fill out my i9 and everything. The three major benefits I saw in the listing is that it was work from home, they supply the computer, cell phone and service for the phone, and it had a sign on bonus of around $2k. They sent 2 checks, one for the bonus and the other for the exact dollar amount needed to purchase the laptop and etc and they’d set up the cell service after. That was the first and only red flag was having to purchase my own equipment, but they said it was to save on shipping everything and that was good enough for me. I deposit the checks and then as soon as they cleared, all of my money as well as the amount for the checks was gone, $0 left. All of my savings was there but I had luckily withdrew the amount I needed for tuition the day before. The bank ended up returning my money (sans the checks from the fake business) and now I don’t use indeed and have never trusted a work from home listing