There is a scam going on around here.
Person on the phone,calls you by name, says you’ve won a huge amount of money,all you hafta do is send them a check for $500.00 by messenger… Btw,said messenger is gonna be on your porch in 5 minutes… I’m sure no one here would fall for this,but we all have moms&dads&aunts&neighbors… Plz spread the word that this is bogus.
So the messenger isn’t there in five minutes?
Thankfully, I don’t have a porch.
I’d get on another phone and call 911 ASAP. The cops could hassle the messenger.
If that’s the case, no tip for him.
Damn shoddy service.
“Around here” being the general internet neighborhood? I’m pretty sure my relatives and neighbors are bright enough to avoid this clever scam without getting an alert from me.
No thank you. My friends don’t like being hassled by breathless forewarding of every dumbass Internet scare story. They’re funny that way.
That would be a remarkably stupid and inefficient way to attempt to scam someone. You can call scammers a lot of things, but “hardworking” isn’t really one of them.
I have to think anyone dumb enough to hand over 500 bucks on nothing more than the say-so of a voice on the phone deserves what they get.
This is a weak, childlike scam. If someone is likely to fall for this, I’d say they’re not (or no longer) responsible enough to handle money.
The OP may not be aware that what she is describing is one version of the advance fee/Spanish Prisoner/Nigerian prince scam and has been going around, in one form or another, for over a hundred years. See this Wikipedia article for more details.
Except for the part where the scammer shows up, in person, at your door. That’s the part I’m having trouble believing.
Exactly. A scammer would have you mail a check to a post box. They’re not going to show up at your door in person after giving you a five minute advance notice to call the police.
Oh my god it would be worth $500 for one of those bastards to show up at my door. I’d then use the (hopefully not too blood stained) money I took back from them to pay bail.
This is where you hang up unless you have a penchant for playing with these schmoes.
Sorry - I live in a very small town with a population of uneducated old people… the info came from the Police. We try to look out for the gullable,but they want to believe.
This. That’s be SWEET!
Most people have older relatives who eventually will suffer from dementia.
People with even a tiny bit of dementia do not deserve to get cheated.
Wouldn’t it be better just to call 911 and have the police waiting for them?
I had people from Jamaica calling me for MONTHS with this scam. I kept telling them I knew they were scammers, I kept telling them to quit calling me, and they would not give up. They called at all hours of the day and night, they became more and more incensed, as if I was inconveniencing them by not responding to their solicitations. They swore at me, they swore at my 85-year-old mother. I contacted the FCC, I contacted the local police, but nobody would do anything about it. Finally, thankfully, they gave up, but it must have been about 18 months of horror.
And I always knew it was them because they always asked for “Mister ReeSHARD”.