Telephone scammers even call for a taxi!

[Frank Cox]

The guy who runs the taxi service in town just posted this.

Telephone scammers are the worst and will go to extraordinary lengths to rip people off!!! 3 times now I've been called on the taxi dispatch line by someone with a strong African accent and a USA phone number to arrange pick up of their "Grandmother" or "Grandfather" out on a farm in the Melville area. They want me to bring them into town so they can buy visa gift cards at the bank. In other words, these scammers find some vulnerable senior citizen and convince them they owe money and have to pay it with a gift card. When the senior tells the scammer they don't drive a car, the scammers try to arrange a taxi to pick them up...unbelievable!! I actually talked to one of the "attempted victims" and they wanted her to buy a $1000 gift card! Please talk to your elderly parents/grandparents about these scams.

[Bobby Henderson]

There are all kinds of scams being run these days. Senior citizens are, sadly, a very frequent target. There are some real horror stories out there. A gift card scam is bad enough. But some truly evil people will latch hold of an elder person if they think they can run an estate scam. Suddenly they become this person's best friend and even practically move in with them -all with the aim of getting anything of value leading up to when this elderly person dies. Family members get cut out of an inheritance thanks to a Johnny-come-lately grifter. One lady tried doing this shit with my Aunt Patricia in her final years. It was fucking disgusting. It's amazing how low some people are willing to stoop at attempting to make a buck.

Businesses have to be street wise. From time to time we'll get people calling our business wanting to confirm our account details. God forbid one of these fuckers gets me on the line. I'll rope-a-dope them for about 10 minutes acting like a stupid idiot, just to waste their time and have some fun at their expense. Then when they finally realize I'm wise to their scam I'll lay the fuck into them on how they're worthless wastes of DNA running these scams. They'll usually hang up pretty quick though.

What's sad is so many Americans are NOT street smart at all when it comes to scams over the phone or online. They'll get a phishing email asking them to confirm details about their email account, bank account or whatever. Just clicking anything at all in those messages can get a person's computer totally infected with malware. I really wish regular email servers of big providers like Google, Yahoo, etc would at least scan and delete any malicious attachments. Not as much can be done with malicious links other than add warnings to the email note.