Choices

Recently A Current Affair had a story on scams which targeted the elderly. The general essence of the story was that scammers were somehow worse for preying on the more vulnerable within society. Personally, I believe a scam is a scam, no matter who gets caught up in it, and age and gender play very little part other than in the obvious relationship scams. But a scam can only work if the “target” allows it to.

Many years ago my ex targeted one of my sisters for a loan. The long term result was she had to sell her house to pay the bank, but until then no-one in the family knew what she’d done. She’d slept with him, kept his little secret from me – and everyone else – and yet when the crunch came somehow I was to blame because, despite the fact that he had a very questionable financial history known to the family, he was my ex-husband and he was only around – according to my sister – because I allowed him to be. She has never accepted that she made her own choices.

So it is with any scam. There are choices to be made, and when those choices involve handing over money, for whatever reason, I know I’d like to have all the bases covered – as much as possible – with written contracts witnessed by reputable legal people known to me.

I just can’t understand how someone can hand over thousands of dollars to an unknown entity in order to supposedly receive multi-million dollar lottery winnings from another country in a lottery they never even entered.

Or send huge sums to someone they met through an online dating site and have never met in person.

Or mortgage their house to give money to a person with a proven less-than-acceptable track record with finances.

I do know how desperate people can be, for whatever reason, and it is often the desperation that causes otherwise sensible people to take risks. Desperate for love, desperate for money – or maybe simply desperate to believe that people are intrinsically good. But that doesn’t excuse the foolishness of those who are on the receiving end of a scam. For a scam to work in the first place someone has to allow it.

The adage that keeps popping up is “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”. I can empathise with people who get caught, but I find it hard to sympathise with them because, ultimately, they made their own choices.