WHAT will be the new scam that will surprise us this year? It seems that the start of each year seemingly brings new challenges to our daily lives.
In the past cyclones, fires and floods have disrupted the lives of many millions of people around the world.
Now a major war is raging and smaller wars are playing out in different countries. While at home a battle rages over privacy and the laws surrounding it.
Every day we hear about someone getting ripped off, someone falling for these con artists around the world and you wonder why people fall for these shysters.
Yet some of these scams are so involved and so perfect that even people who should know better get taken in and succumb to their tricks.
Even though young people are aware of these scammers, they too fall for these “tricks”, engineered to take all or part of our money or identity.
Those of us in the silent generation generally are embarrassed when we fall for these phone calls or internet scams, yet there have been many who have trusted what they have been told and ended up many thousands of dollars out of pocket.
How would you feel losing your life savings to someone you don’t even know?
Dating sites on the internet are sometimes used by sophisticated groups of people around the world to get your trust, steal your information and make you look a fool.
They steal the hearts of vulnerable people, young and old alike!
Lonely people, maybe looking for love and or companionship succumb to repeated attempts to glean every bit of information from their victims.
Sometimes they are so persuasive that this “grooming” can take months and can be a gradual affair meant to lull one into a false sense of security.
In days gone by, many of our older seniors went out in groups, dancing, sports, church, work and school and over the years that followed got to know their friends a lot better by their interactions within the group and often married from that select few.
Many of those groups now have been married for many years.
Looking ahead, I wonder if married people of today will look forward to a long marriage as previous generations have.
There seems to be so much negativity in our lives today, so many having mental issues, so many one parent families and divided households.
Maybe we have to become less trusting of what strangers say. Be careful with phone calls you might receive, if a company calls or a government department notifies you wanting personal information, call them back on a number you know will reach them, double check the details given and ask yourself is this a scam.
