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 an overdraft of £1,600 with his bank.
Once he had given these people his phone number their pressure was relentless. John came to stay with us for a couple of weeks whist we tried to understand and sort out the problem. We discovered it is surprisingly easy to send money using modern mobile phones with bank apps quickly and inconspicuously. We did not really discover what was going until the last two days of his stay.
That happened after an incident in the middle of the night. At two o'clock in the morning my elderly relative burst into our bedroom in a state of anxiety. Two other women had phoned him. Their story was that they had gone thirty miles from their home town to a pub and been robbed and needed money for a taxi to get home. My brother gave me the phone and I said to them “This is a taxi scam”. They rang off immediately but then sent a text which started as follows:
“Thank u for abandoning two vulnerable seriously ill women 30 miles from home without funds or coats out in the cold which they are vulnerable to who hv been nothing but kind and good to u and paid u bk regularily etc, etc...”
Of course the message does raise the issue of why “two seriously ill women” were thirty miles from home in a pub late on a Friday night but our elderly relative was more attentive to the guilt being imposed on him than the improbability of the story. He seems to believe that these women are really ill.
After the shock of the early morning call Uncle John gave us access to his phone and his bank account which revealed the pressure he had been under. We had been oblivious that on one day during his stay with us, a women, let's call her Hecate, had texted him over 70 times and also phoned him directly trying to persuade him to send more money. He sent her £158 in five payments. The last payment was £8, it was the last money available from his overdraft that month. The telephone scams would restart as soon as his bank account replenished with his pension payments.
The scams took two main forms, The Locksmith Scam and The Taxi Scams. In the former Hecate would ring him and say “I'm in terrible trouble. I've locked myself out of the house and it will cost me £100 to call the locksmith, I've got £40, can you send me the remaining £60”. This was embellished with claims food was cooking on the stove or that her son (aged 8) was locked into the house. Taxi scams were more varied but having built up a debt to John, Hecate would ring and say that she wanted to repay John £700 but first she needed to deliver her son to her mother so she could collect the money and then go to the bank and for that she needed £30 for a taxi. Then there was what we called a sub-scam, which was to ring John after he had sent money and tell him the money had not arrived and could he send it again. So my relative would get on his banking app. and obliviously send her a double payment. The debt of course has never been repaid.
Whilst most of us, even if we fell for these scams once would not do so a second time, my relative was quite unable to comprehend the intention of the women who were sending the messages and continued to give money whilst receiving nothing in return. In colloquial language it really was “Rinse and Repeat”
The Police are unable to act because the gifts of money are just gifts as long as no threats are used although if evidence can be given of regular harassment the picture changes. The family has rallied round. We discovered the Bank had a telephone number for relatives or friends to ring if they were worried about financial impropriety but they are only able to act on instructions from account holders until a Lasting Power of Attorney is Agreed. They defined the problem as “A Friendship Scam” and did set things up, so that when John was finally persuaded to phone their fraud line, they explained the nature of the scam to him and at his request immediately blocked the transfers of money to the three drug addicts' accounts.
His son has contacted the local Safeguarding Adults Board and the GP has been invoked to organise a mental assessment to determine if a Lasting Power of Attorney can be agreed so that John's money can be kept for him alone.
The key message from all that is we all need to be aware that elderly people who suffer loneliness become vulnerable to the scams of the unscrupulous. We also need to realise the extent of the damage the County Lines Drug Trade does within the communities of our smaller cities and towns.
Names have been changed.
.JPG)
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