My poor son was mightily peeved this morning when I interrupted his work by calling him to ask if some marvel of an offer that arrived in the mail was, as suspected, a scam.
Yes. Of course it’s a scam. Quit breaking into my workday with that stuff!
Uh huh.
Well, what happens when you’re old is that it gets harder and harder for you to distinguish the Fake from the Real. That’s even when you know very well that about every third person you encounter wants to rip you off.
Yes. Even when you know that 99% of what comes in the mail is a scam. Yes. Even now that virtually every phone call comes from a crook. I no longer even answer the phone. Leave me a message, and maybe I’ll call you back. If I know you personally…
Even ordinary adults in their working years get quite enough nuisance calls! Now add to that the calls for help from elder relatives who have been pestered by this, that, or the other scammer, and you get…overwhelming!
Today I got a snail-mail from what looked like a legitimate creditor telling me that I’d better pay up some late bill or it would be off to jail for me, by golly!
Uh huh.
Well, on some level I knew that was BS, because I don’t buy things on time. If can’t afford to pay for it now, I don’t get it.
But that’s not 100%. Yes, of course I do have some creditors. Don’t we all?
Well…yeah. That’s what the scammers are counting on.
My son was enraged when I broke into his work morning to ask if today’s telephoned demand for money was something real…or what. This made me feel like a sh!t, of course. But…what would I have felt like if I’d fallen for the caller’s scam?
Honestly. I think a person could make a living by hiring out to answer people’s phones and screen the incoming trash. No kidding: at this point, I would seriously consider hiring someone to answer my calls. MOST of the calls I get these days are hustles and scams. Hiring someone to screen incoming would relieve me of a fair amount of tooth-grinding!
Same with the mail. It’s getting to the point where I won’t open an envelope unless I recognize the sender’s name & address. ANY envelope. But that means that occasionally someone I do business with is not gonna be able to reach me by snail-mail. Or by phone. In other words: they can’t reach me at all.
Probably the trick to that would be to insert some sort of code into your return address.
Jane 324 Doe, Esquire
1234 Erewhon Road
New York, N.Y. 23456
But these edited return addresses would, over time, be collected by the hustlers, so that eventually you would no longer be able to tell the difference between legit correspondence and hustles. And of course, to the extent that such a maneuver works, it will waste your time as you dork around with the coded addresses.
The older you get, the tiresomer it gets!