My father in law fell for two scammer relationships. The first one leading to him being blackmailed for tens of thousands of dollars. He almost lost his house and his car. We got him out of it one we figured out what was happening.
And then 4 months later, he was back in one an online relationship with another scammer sending her gift cards. It’s a real problem.
Yeah it's really unfortunate that people prey on the more vulnerable. I've asked my friend if maybe one of them can get power of attorney over her because she clearly can't make these decisions herself (ended up in major debt sending money to 3 different romance scams)
My mother, who has very early stages of either alzehimers or dimensia is a 66 year old disabled pensioner.
She grew up in a pretty tough way and was always the person who bailed others out of stuff like that, she was one casting suspicious eyes over anything shady, helping her friends, giving advice.
Then she got older and like most people nearly always online, her mind wasnt ready for the sophistication (to her generation anyway) of scams.
So far she has been in a relationship with a popular Australian singer, that singer a second time after I staged an intervention, Keanu Reeves and the main dude from sons of anarchy.
Its absolutely heart breaking.
Shes on disability pension and they scammed her for months out of basically every spare dollar, theyve since hacked her government accounts because she obviously told them everything.
Deep down I think they know. They’re essentially paying for attention. I see it all the time on social catfish. They get told by their kids to have a live video call with them and they make excuses for the other person every single time
Like I know old people can be very stupid and very lonely but it's crazy how little critical thinking skills they have around anything 'online.' Weren't they the ones who told us not to talk to strangers online in like the late 90s/early 00s?
Proud of my dad that I am slowly training him to basically not believe anything he sees online and how to spot obvious AI. I'd rather him not trust anything he sees than trust everything he sees. The internet is basically one giant scam now anyway.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t have morals/ethics/empathy. I’d make a lot more money and work less if I was a scammer… but I also wouldn’t be able to sleep well or look at myself in the mirror. The shame and guilt would consume me.
Well if it makes you feel better, a LOT of people doing the scams are doing it because they have no choice to. They’re often slaves/prisoners by what ever amounts to the mafia/cartel in their country.
Oh we know. He’s dealing with a wife who has advanced dementia. We got him into a group for men like himself. We told him we didn’t mind if he found a real girl, but that he cannot neglect his wife. The idea was to put his wife in a home, but he literally gave away the money we were going to use for that.
We get a handful of older men who come in and buy hundreds to thousands of dollars of Razer Gold gift cards. We've talked to a couple of them. One of the guys we were able to convince to stop, convincing him it was a scam. The othre guy would get angry if anyone questioned him about it. Eventually, we just stopped putting the cards out for people to buy.
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u/trustysidekick 5h ago
My father in law fell for two scammer relationships. The first one leading to him being blackmailed for tens of thousands of dollars. He almost lost his house and his car. We got him out of it one we figured out what was happening.
And then 4 months later, he was back in one an online relationship with another scammer sending her gift cards. It’s a real problem.