A couple of weeks ago, I was on the phone with my dad. He’s 86. He told me that a couple of days before, he and my stepmom had been entertaining another couple in their house in the Ozarks when the phone rang. My dad answered the phone.
“Hi, Grandad,” the voice on the other end said.
It was a male sounding voice. My dad has only one grandson, who happens to be my 27 year old son. His name is Reed and he’s been estranged from my side of the family for about three years for reasons I don’t understand. We miss Reed a lot.
So Daddy said, “Is that you, Reed?”
“Yes,” said Reed.
“Where are you,” said Daddy.
“I’m in Missouri. I was up here for a wedding. I was actually the best man. After I left the wedding to drive back home, I got into a car accident. A woman was killed. She was 26 and six months pregnant.”
“Are you in jail?”
“Yes.”
“Oh dear, Reed. What can I do to help?”
“I don’t really know, and they’re only allowing me one minute for this phone call, but I have a public defender. Let me give you his phone number. He can tell you what the deal is.”
My dad called the number, and the person told him that it would be $9,600 to get Reed out of jail. Daddy hung up, went to the dining room, and told my stepmom and his guests to please excuse him, but he had to get to the bank before it closed. He drove to the bank and withdrew 96 hundred dollar bills.
When he got home, he called the “public defender” to find out where in Missouri he needed to drive to in order to get Reed out of jail. The details get a little fuzzy here for me, but it seems like the guy on the other end of the phone got vague at this point. Meanwhile my stepmom was on the phone with law enforcement in Missouri who told her that they had no one by my son’s name in custody and no reports of arrest for involuntary homicide or vehicular homicide for the time period in question.
My stepmom also found my son’s work number online, so my Dad called him and Reed said that he hadn’t been away from his New York home for quite some time and certainly wasn’t in a Missouri jail. Daddy said that Reed’s reception of him at the beginning of the call was cold, but he at least thanked Daddy for the call at the end of it.
Okay. Imagine that. Imagine your 86 year old father driving across rural Arkansas and Missouri with $9,600 in cash on him in response to this kind of call. I just don’t have words to describe the way I felt, because bone chilling doesn’t quite do it justice and that’s as close as I can get.
I called my sister to tell her what had happened, and she said that she remembered something similar happening to some family friends of ours recently. Today I got in touch with them. Sure enough, over the last couple of years BOTH sets of grandparents have been assaulted by similar schemes. In one instance, they were told to buy gift cards and then call back with the numbers. They bought $4,000 in gift cards. In another, the caller said, “This is your grandson,” but my friend’s mother doesn’t have any grandsons, only granddaughters, so she said, “You must have the wrong number.”
This is a thing, y’all, and if you are a grandparent or if you know any grandparents, you need to be aware of it. My dad is a smart, active, engaged man, but when he got a call from a person he thought was his estranged grandson in need of help, my dad didn’t ask any questions except, “How can I help you?” This could be any of us.
After I got off the phone with my dad, I called our local sheriff’s office. I told them I knew they weren’t the right people to deal with this, but could they tell me who to call to report it. I’m so glad I called. They absolutely knew who to report it to, and it wasn’t anyone I would have thought of.
If anything like this happens to you or a loved one, call the Federal Trade Commission at 1-877-382-4357. I know, isn’t that weird? But because it happened over a land line, the FTC is the right people to notify and they have law enforcement resources.
If you get a call from one of your grandkids in trouble, make sure it’s your grandkid, okay? And please report it. If the FTC gets enough reports on this with the information like the number the caller was calling from, they have the resources to make it stop.
Sunday, May 13, 2018 · 2:26:57 AM +00:00
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nancyjones
I’ve been reading the comments and it’s clear to me that many people have had this same sort of experience. Many of the comments seem to suggest that if someone is fooled by these kinds of calls, then they’re a fool. That’s simply not true. Anyone can be fooled, given the right circumstances.
The one point I want to come out from this diary is that if this happens to you, even if you’re one of the people who doesn’t get fooled, please report it to the FTC. The FTC has the resources to stop this. You don’t, but you have the capability to report it to them.