Scammers Persuade Grandfather to Send Ransom by Mail
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Seventy-nine-year-old Jack receives a call from a young woman claiming to be his granddaughter, Grace. She tells Grandpa Jack that she's in jail as a result of a car accident and begs him to call her attorney. The attorney claims that Grace was texting and driving and needs money for bail. Jack is instructed to send the money in cash through the mail. Before the ordeal is over, Jack sends $19,000 through the mail — but with the guidance of the police, he's able to fight back against the scammer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on the perfect scam. |
| 0:04.0 | The second he walked out of the car, the detective with eyes on his car says, |
| 0:07.0 | hey, that's him. |
| 0:08.0 | Three or four guys converge on him and they were off to the races. fortunately we had our runners out there and he didn't get too far. |
| 0:17.0 | Welcome back to AARP's the perfect scam. |
| 0:23.1 | I'm your host Michelle Kaczynski. |
| 0:25.1 | This week, this one ends unexpectedly. |
| 0:29.8 | We're going to take a look at a particularly disturbing |
| 0:32.3 | grandparent scam. Now these things have been going on for some years and I would say they bear a special ranking on the horribly scale because this is when a scammer impersonates someone's grandchild |
| 0:44.0 | pretending to be in big trouble, in jail or the hospital, and of course in need of money, |
| 0:51.0 | just praying on and exploiting the things that make grandparents so |
| 0:55.9 | great, their enormous love and caring and wanting to help. And this one has |
| 1:01.9 | quite a twist, or maybe I should say twisted ending. |
| 1:06.7 | Now the Federal Trade Commission says this kind of scam is not just growing, it's |
| 1:11.2 | exploding. These scammers netted around 26 million dollars from people in the |
| 1:16.1 | US in 2017 and one year later that had jumped up to 41 million, probably because it's so lucrative. |
| 1:25.6 | And we should warn you, with coronavirus, the FTC says these scammers are on the prowl. |
| 1:31.4 | Because now there's even more urgency |
| 1:33.4 | when they tell grandparents that the kid in question |
| 1:36.5 | is terribly sick or stuck overseas |
| 1:39.7 | and money needs to be wired immediately. |
| 1:42.6 | Just an ugly situation. |
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