re: Nigerian prince arrested in Slidell

quote:

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Sadly, many of the victims are the elderly who live alone and are mostly nice, trusting people who probably are lonely and have too much time on their hands. Some are starting to show signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s and just seem to fall for scams such as these or phone calls. It’s not that they are dumb as some have significant assets, it’s just there are so many ways and bad people that come up with new scams every day to separate people from their money.

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Yes, this is sadly true. A few years ago, my siblings and I had to step in and get involved when we found out that some female servers at a local restaurant where my now late father was eating at regularly were taking advantage of his generosity (and probably some loneliness and want for female attention) to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. We found out that he also co-signed an auto-loan for one, thus messing up his credit rating, and "loaned" another one thousands of dollars for her to purchase a used mobile home. Another one (we think, had no proof) stole a small coin collection of his as it mysteriously disappeared during the time they were hanging around him. Unfortunately, unless we were willing to do an intervention and go to court to try to declare him incompetent (something that is more problematic than one would think, my dad would have easily passed any competency test), we found out there was little we could do to stop this besides confronting the women and trying to scare them off, which we did, and trying to spend as much time with him as possible. As we all lived away from him, it was a difficult situation, to say the least. We tried to get him to move in with one of us, but he absolutely refused as he was very independent-minded and insisted on living in his own house. I got some help from the Office of Elderly Affairs. I was told by them that elder abuse (mostly in the form of stealing their money) is rampant in the country and will only get worse as the country ages.