I’ve long believed that there’s a special place in Hell for people who prey on the defenseless. Child molesters. Wife/child/elder beaters. And people who scam the mentally disabled and/or senior citizens.
My dad will be seventy in a couple of weeks. This morning, while he was sitting at home waiting for me to come in from Louisville, three men in a black Ford pick-up drove up to the farm house. They claimed they had blacktop sealant left over from a job, it was going to go to waste, would he like them to seal his driveway for cheap?
Daddy said he didn’t have the money for it. They told him they were more interested in just getting rid of the stuff, they would only charge him $5.00 to do the work. So Daddy said okay.
There’s a pick-up truck and two cars (my dad’s and my older brother’s) in the driveway. Daddy gave one of the men the keys to my brother’s car so he could move it, while Daddy moved the truck and his car. They sprayed down the driveway in about five minutes, then told dad “That’ll be six-fifty.”
“Let me see if I have fifty cents”, Daddy said.
The men said, “No, that’s six hundred and fifty dollars.“
“But you told me you could do the work for five dollars!” my dad sputtered.
“Well, yeah. Five dollars a pound.”
Here’s why scams like this work:
(1) Con men like this look for senior citizens. They know that seniors–especially seniors in rural areas–come from a different era, where written estimates and formal contracts for basic repairs and maintenance work were largely unneeded. Seniors tend to still think the world works that way, and con men exploit it.
(2) Seniors also are sensitive about their mental acuity. They start getting forgetful, or hard of hearing, and it’s very embarassing to them. They’ve been independent and able to take care of themselves and others for most of their lives, and when they start to slip it’s a source of frustration and sometimes shame. So they try very hard to cover for it, to the point where they will assume they’re in the wrong when they really aren’t.
(3) Con men make sure they do the work before they spring the “real” price on you, so you automatically think you’re legally obligated to pay them. But you’re not–that’s called a “bait-and-switch” and it’s illegal.
But here’s my poor dad, who’s hearing isn’t great, who just lost his wife in February and is having to take over running the household, and who’s just been told that he misunderstood the price.
So he wrote them a check.
I got home about thirty minutes after the men left. The minute I heard the story I called the bank to stop the check. We had to come in to the bank to sign for stopping it, but fortunately for us the bank was only four miles away. The customer service person confirmed that the check was cashed about twenty minutes before I walked in the door.
We called the police, of course, and filed a report. The bank is working with the police to pull the security camera photos, to get a picture of the asshole who cashed the check.
We WILL find these jerks. But in the meantime, I’m telling everyone I know what happened. And now that Daddy’s over his embarassment, he’s telling everyone else, too. Hell, I may call the local paper next week–if we can get our hands on the bank photo of this guy and there’s no problem releasing it to the public, I’l take out a fornicatin’ ad. Our real estate agent thinks the same men may have been through his neighborhood a week or so ago.
The more people who know about these guys and their modus operandi, the more likely they’ll get busted by the sheriff.
Assholes.
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