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laying brikks versus playing prikks

webmostwebmost Posts: 7,713 ✭✭✭✭✭
Bearswatter calls up frantic yesterday afternoon. Says our grandson Wade phoned her from jail. Hard to make him out, what with a lot of inmates shouting in the background and a poor connection and a guard who hustled him off the horn before he was done. The essence was this: Wade drove to Nevada to attend a friend's funeral, had a glass of wine at a gathering afterwards, then hit the road, where he was rear-ended by some stranger, taken to the hospital, where his blood alcohol was routinely tested, which test he failed, leading to incarceration. Labeled a flight risk cause he is out of state, won't release him. Can't talk now. Don't tell anyone cause Wade hasn't talked to the wife yet. Needs to get out, get back to work. Lawyer will call you soon. Love you Grandma.

At which point, that partner of my life given to melodrama calls me in tears, with a quivering voice, chick flick plots spinning round in her head, to ask me a rapid series of the type of question which she loves to ask me, namely questions to which I would obviously have no ghost of a chance to possess any answer. Except for this question: "Why did he call me Grandma?" Bearswatter is Nana. Has been ever since she raised her infants' infants, from the time they were far too young to be construed to pronounce any sound more complex than "nana" despite obvious incipient infantile genius precocity. To this question, "Why did he call me Nana?", I replied: "Call his wife." Had to repeat that directive a dozen times, cause Bearswatter wasn't done emoting yet.

Before she could call the wife, though, a "lawyer" called her from a Vegas phone number. Says the air bag went off, broke Wade's nose, makes him talk funny, otherwise he's fine; but incarcerated in an infamous Nevada jail featured on certain investigative news specials. Says because Wade is a straight arrow, he has negotiated the bail amount down to twelve hundred. Advises she send funds to a certain bail bondsman in the Dominican Republic. Bearswatter replies she has to consult the irascible coot whose skid marks she has the privilege of laundering.

Which Nana does next. Before she gets far, I ask: "Did you call his wife?" Have to repeat that another dozen times while she emotes. Apparently, I will never learn the patience to let her finish doing that first.

She hangs up. Calls Haley. "What? Wade's at work." Bearswatter gives her all the details she can remember. Phone numbers, etc.

Wade called his Nana later, cause he is a fine young man. "Yeah, home already, we packed our tools up early. It's actually raining so hard here (Utah) we had to quit for the day." Got a job as a hoddy. Tremendous good work for a burley young man. Says he called the jail. They said "Yeah, we get that all the time. Call your bank and credit cards."



Here's the deal: For a lousy twelve hundred bucks, considering all the detailed thought and effort these cog suckers put into this scam, from the prison background sound effects to the bad connection to the broken nose... With half the effort put into something useful, like simply carrying hod, they could have made twice the money, without giving an old lady a bad day. They must do these elaborate schemes purely through love of chicanery.

“It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.” —Thomas Jefferson (1808)


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    raisindotraisindot Posts: 1,294 ✭✭✭
    Wow. Just wow. As you say, so much work for probably so little success. Wonder how many of these they have to set up a day to get a real punter?

    Although I would assume that $1,200 was a low enough figure that it wouldn't seem worth questioning. And I would suspect the "lawyer" would ask for your credit card number "to make things easier." That is ultimately what they were after I'd think.

    Take the same sort of scam, up the amount to $1 million, and you have--Bernie Madoff and hedge funds.
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    dr_frankenstein56dr_frankenstein56 Posts: 1,612 ✭✭✭
    crazy balls man, thats some elaborate chit right there.

    Aj
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    jd50aejd50ae Posts: 7,900 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Most elaborate scam I have heard of to date.....right up to the bail going to the Dominican Republic.

    I have an idiot step son that fell for the Nicaraguan scam "need help getting money out of the country" and deposited a $2000 check which he ended up being liable for.
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    matkn293matkn293 Posts: 3,565 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Its crazy to think that this will work and I bet my bottom dollar it is more successful than you think. My Grandma, the fine lady that she is, called me one day asking if I was OK. Someone tried pulling a similar scam on her. Something tipped her off that is was fake so she called me right away. Crazy enough, they had enough info to make it somewhat believable. Someone that does not have all of their wits about them as sometimes happens to our older generation can easily fall into this trap.

    Life is too short to smoke bad cigars!!!

    Oh when the Blues, Oh when the Blues, Oh when the Blues go marching in!


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    jd50aejd50ae Posts: 7,900 ✭✭✭✭✭
    matkn293:
    Its crazy to think that this will work and I bet my bottom dollar it is more successful than you think. My Grandma, the fine lady that she is, called me one day asking if I was OK. Someone tried pulling a similar scam on her. Something tipped her off that is was fake so she called me right away. Crazy enough, they had enough info to make it somewhat believable. Someone that does not have all of their wits about them as sometimes happens to our older generation can easily fall into this trap.


    I use to read a thing called "Internet Scams and Traps". It was amazing how many there were/are. Some were just plain stupid and some were very elaborate but you could see through them.

    They use to be all Nigeria and occasionally included a Great Britain e-mail and Bank. Now it seems even our phones are being used for these scams, and I wonder if that doesn't make a whole bunch of federal laws come into play.This is the first one I have heard of that did not play to the potential greed of the victim, I.E. my idiot step son.

    As far as getting information about someone, that is so easy its scary. Social media proved to be the downfall of my grandson's real father when he started making noises about being a dad and wanting custody.

    When I worked as a skip-tracer, pre-internet, it usually took 1 to 2 days to gather all the information I needed just by making a couple of phone calls to neighbors or local gad-fly's.
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