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OM 90. A Story of An Elderly Man and three Drug Addicts. Or: When Uncle John Came to Stay... Scams are ubiquitous these days as people try to deceive us through the misuse of compassion or the perversion of the norms of decent behavior. A few weeks ago I received an email, apparently from John, an elderly relative, asking if I would lend him £500 so that he could take to the Small Claims Court, debtors to whom he had given “too much money” to reclaim the debt. Of course I immediately thought that it was a scam and phoned John to tell him his computer had been taken over by a virus and was sending out requests for money. His reply was “it's not a scam, I really need the money”. It turned out that over the past few years he had felt sorry, for drug addicts he had met in a park in his town in the West Country. They had asked him for money, and over time he had sent them unrecorded payments which amounted to many thousands of pounds in savings and his pension, and instead had