Senior Scams [[Send me money!]]
OK, I admit it. I’m a senior man. I’m sixty six, retired, and I spend a lot of time “on the internet.” I suspect many if not most seniors spend a lot of time on it, at least those who have a computer and an internet connection.
Frankly, I can’t imagine NOT having a computer and access to the internet. Really. I have no desire to go back to the Pre-internet days of oh, say, anytime before 1990.
Why? Well Google for one. I mean really. Can you imagine not having ready access to Google? I can’t. I ask Google all kinds of questions, and Google is able to supply me with credible answers, or at least a link to a good resource where I can find an answer with just a little bit of reading.
Twitter is another reason I love the internet. Yeah, I’ve become a Twitter addict. There ought to be a name for Twitter addicts…. OK, I Googled it. We’re called, “Tweeple.” That’s funny. It sounds like something out of a Dr Seus book. I love to tweet because it allows me to weigh in on lots of subjects that I care about, and see if others feel the same way I do.
As you might imagine, there are lots of us who are addicted to Twitter. There are so many, that Google even has a prescription for weeding ourselves off of Twitter. It involves hard things, like setting time limits and rewarding ourselves (positive reinforcement) when we adhere to the restriction. Just make sure you don’t reward yourself with more Twitter time, or that sort of defeats the purpose!
But the other day I noticed I got a Twitter message from somebody I didn’t know. Being naturally curious, I opened the Tweet mail message and found it was from an attractive French young lady who sent me a picture of herself and just said, “Hi!” For blog purposes I’ll call her “Jackie.”
Now, I had just finished writing a small ‘Self-Help’ book entitled, ‘Talk to Strangers, Break the Ice! (Available for $0.99 on Amazon.com), and so I thought it would be fun to see if I could strike up a conversation with this total stranger who reached out to me from Paris. After all, you never know what you can learn by talking to a stranger. (That’s one of the themes of my short book.)
So I did converse with her in Twitter messaging. Jackie sent me messages in a broken English, and I used Google Translate to send my replies in French. It seemed to work well enough.
For some reason I never understood, she wanted me to jump to Instagram, but I explained I didn’t have an account, and I preferred to use Twitter. After all, Twitter messaging is very much like an e-mail account, and there is nothing wrong with it. She was persistent, but I didn’t give in.
Jackie said she was a student studying in Paris to get a medical degree of some sort. She said she wanted to be an anesthesiologist which I thought was very ambitious. She said the schooling was free, but she supported herself working at a bar-restaurant which I thought was a credible story.
She said she lived alone since her parents had died when she was young, she had no siblings and she was generally lonely and liked to meet people over the internet. OK. Still believable, but I started to get suspicious.
She sent me a few pictures of herself. There were no naked shots, and I didn’t ask or want any, but she is (or was) a very attractive twenty five year-old French girl. I told her I was sixty six and too old for her. After all, she was young enough to be my daughter. Oddly, I have a step-daughter about her age.
I thought the relationship was getting strange when I felt she was getting too attached to me. She said she didn’t care about our age difference. I did. And then it happened.
After a few days of no messages, Jackie sent me a sobbing message telling me that her one living relative, her grandmother had sent her a message telling her that she, the grandmother, was in the hospital and was about to die. Jackie needed money for a plane ticket to go see her.
Instantly alarm bells went off inside my head.
You may think it cruel of me but I wrote her back telling her that her ploy didn’t work on me. She immediately cut me off inside of Twitter Messaging.
I told this story to my older brother and he said it probably wasn’t even a girl. He said it was probably a group of fat cigar smoking guys who lived somewhere in the Philippines!
He said they probably scraped the pictures of some cutie off the internet to send me and that it was a scam business for them. They like to prey on American seniors who live by themselves and spend way too much time on Twitter.
In retrospect, I have to admit whoever it was, was good at what they did. While I wasn’t scammed, I actually felt like I had a small father-daughter attachment to Jackie, and I hated that they confirmed my worst suspicions. Of course, I know it’s silly because now I’m sure it was all fiction. But hey, I’m as human as the next guy, complete with all the frailties that entails.
What’s the moral of the story?
Watch out for scams like Jackie on the internet. You can play along with them if you dare, but know those creeps know how to pull you in and tug at your heartstrings if you’re not careful.
