A woman who I know has a number of elderly siblings, ranging in age from being over seventy to being almost ninety. Recently, two of them (we’ll call them M. and B.) have been receiving occasional telephone calls from (according to their caller IDs) a number in Canada. The people calling claim to be their grandchildren, although it is obvious that they are not. The people calling know the names of the grandchildren, of the grandparents, and of some other family members. They also seem to know at least a little bit of out-of-date information about the grandkids. The calls tend to be about how the grandkids are in some sort of a predicament, and lead up to pleas for the grandparents to wire money to them to help them out of their troubles.
For example, one recent call was to M. and was claiming to be his grandson, C. The caller said that he was was driving through downtown Cincinnati at night and got into a car accident, and that he needed money to pay for his girlfriend’s hospital bill and to get the car repaired. The real-life C. had actually been living in Cincinnati. . .but had moved to California three days earlier, where M. knew him to be at that time due to having talked to C.‘s father a few hours earlier in another telephone call. Also, the callers never quite sound like the people who they claim to be, such as by calling M. “grandfather” rather than “gramps” the way that C. always does.
So it’s apparently some sort of a scam, wherein the callers have somehow gained an unknown amount of information about M. and C. (and maybe other people as well) and are trying to con money out of “gullible old geezers”.
Has anybody else here experienced or heard of other cases similar to this lately?
