Comment by strenholme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by strenholme | Hacker News Reader

I met a guy who fell for the romance version of that scam over and over again. He was living in an assisted living facility by himself and was very isolated there. He would, as we all do, get those messages via email/Instagram/other chat networks (I get the most of this kind of spam on Telegram, to the point I have disabled Telegram sending me notifications, but the occasional one slips through on WhatsApp; it seems for whatever reason they have given up on SMS spam) from supposedly “cute” girls who he believed were just random young girls randomly sliding in to his DMs (this guy is in his mid-70s for the record).

It ended up that these girls would ask him for money, and he drained his savings accounts giving money to these “girls”, and even after running out of money, he kept believing these girls were real, they wanted to know him as a person, and that they just needed a little money to help out.

Everyone close to him, including his family, kept telling him these girls weren’t real, to stop contacting them. He would briefly relent, delete all his messaging apps these scammers were using to contact him, then he would feel lonely or what not, reinstall the apps, and resume contact with the scammers. It didn’t matter how many times we told him they weren’t real. It didn’t matter how much money he lost from these scammers pitching their wares to him.

He just stubbornly believed these were actual young girls who wanted to be his friend, no matter how many people told him they weren’t real, that he was just setting himself up to be scammed yet again.

I had to break contact with him. It just really angered me that this guy couldn’t believe something as basic as these girls actually being African/Southeast Asian/etc. scammers and not real people wanting to get to know him.

Most of the people live in the world they invented, where they are the protagonist, naturally young girls want to talk to the protagonist, even when he's 70. You'd have to dismantle their whole worldview to disabuse them of the protagonist idea, but by 70 it's often too far gone and requires facing a million mistakes they have conveniently swept under the rug with the fairytale they've told themselves.

I recently saw a screenshot from Facebook of a mattress ad presented inline in a page load that had two conventionally attractive normal looking (fully clothed, not immodest at all) women on a mattress. Below it was somebody's grandpa writing a message basically to the effect of "hello sexy ladies I am (name) please chat with me".

It possibly could have been a bot, but I don't think bots commonly use profile pictures of dishevelled looking 75 year old men. Maybe for commenting on political agitprop, they do...

This reminded me of something that happened to me maybe 15 years ago. I was helping my Grandpa get his first smart phone. The saleswoman was maybe mid twenties and had a kinda hoarse voice. I was a little bit younger than her and I thought it was cute in its own way but of course I wasn't gonna say anything. She apologized for being hard to understand and my grandpa said no, it was fine, her voice was sexy.

Naturally I was mortified.

But I wonder how much of it is just "Fuck it, I'm an old man, I'm gonna let my creep flag fly."

And why in gods name shouldn't he give somebody a compliment?

You need to reign in your ageism sunshine.

Well, it's hard to convey, but he gave off a strong sense of "hitting on her" and she gave off a strong sense of "I'm in customer service and cannot tell him to stop".

But, I was in my latest teens, earliest twenties; I could have been misreading the situation. All I can say for certain is I was uncomfortable.

At that age a lot of people literally don't have the intellectual capacity to deal with this. Their brain is biologically atrophied due to illness, not exercising it anymore, not seeing or hearing well anymore (this has a huge impact), being socially isolated, etc.

They're not inventing a new world, they're not "conveniently" and consciously sweeping anything under the rug, they're not telling themselves a fairy tale. They're just losing much of the world they were living in and have to deal with what's left, holes and all. Why do you think old people are such easy targets for scams and fraud in general? Do you think only the body degrades with age?

If you're young enough to not have seen this in action ever, you'd be excused for not understanding at all what happens and for building such bad faith scenarios. Common sense and some light reading on the topic would have prevented that nonetheless.

People often believe what they want to believe, even bending logic and facts towards their desire. We see it all the time in politics, up to the point people vote for literal criminals who want to rip them off and they see it, but they just want to believe it's all false.

Why not see this as him buying company? Then you'll understand that loneliness is so hard, that most people would pay a lot of money to ease it.

Ironically, instead of breaking contact, maybe the solution would have been to be there for him more.

Loneliness is hard. Maybe believing that it was real was the only thing keeping him going.

He didn't even believe it.

I of course don't know the person but are you sure he didn't have some mental problem and not just refusing to believe he was being played?

I knew a man and a woman who were in a couple and they were like this, they would believe anything that people told them because they were significantly mentally impaired and had some sort of psychological problem that was unclear. They could be taken advantage of by anyone.

It was pretty sad, in fact the best thing for them was if they were only slightly taken advantage of by people who then had an interest in taking care of them to keep the advantage taking going.

Like if someone drained this guy's back account halfway, but made sure no one else drained it, and came to see him every now and then sent him a nice greeting card. I know that sounds pretty weird to claim but I saw it with this couple, they were essentially protected and controlled by the people who took a little long term advantage, basically because the American system just lets you lose everything and go live on the streets and die if you can't take care of yourself, but if people who need a place to stay come stay with you and make sure your money gets spent on food for everyone they're actually better off. It was sad to see but also the best possible outcome given the miserable situation for them.

Anyway, these people were not fixable by being talked to, and it wasn't because they had spent so many years deluding themselves. It was because they had real problems that meant they could never understand some things.

reddit.com/r/scams/ has numerous and varied reports of these from the point of view of (usually) a concerned family member. It's a real plague on society. Older people who are inclined to be trusting, lonely, isolated or those with diminished mental faculties need to be extensively warned about this. Despite warnings many still engage.

!!SPOILER ALERT!! in Shutter Island:

When he realizes he's committed a terrible crime, the next day he goes back to believing he's a US marshal. His last words:

- this place makes me wonder...

+ Yeah, what's that, boss?

- Which would be worse, to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?

This is a sad reality of life, that leads many, to choose a fantasy over reality. How many of us consistently avoid this trap?

need to set up better scams bilking grandad out of money and funneling to a trust for his grandkids

Yes it's infuriating to see someone you care about fall for an obvious scam, yet... I don't know... If it's his money and it makes him happy, or a little less sad, a little less lonely... Why not...

You'd give away all your money to feel a little bit less sad?

Eventually yes. Just comes to degree. But I do very often spend money to feel that little bit sad. Be it food or snacks or some mostly useless junk I think I need.

If you think about it, the only reason we ever spend money, is to feel a little bit less sad.

When you put it like that it doesn't sound like the worst idea.

It sounds terrible. You used to be sad, now you're still sad and you're destitute too

But less sad!

Honestly the main problem is one of efficiency not whether buying happiness with money is a bad idea. Being less sad is more important than having money, but you do need to plan ahead so you don't run out too quickly.

For some people that’s the best they can hope for.

I can’t tell if you’re joking but people do that all the time, every day. It might be alcohol, strippers, or just random stuff they don’t really need.

If this sounds surprising to you then probably you have enough money that you don’t need to give all of it away to be less sad.

In this thread we're talking about people who have life savings to be scammed out of. I'd say it's probably not an everyday thing that people empty their life savings and blow it all on Temu and strippers.

Because the same techniques are used in the media and politics to get believe and vote for things that aren't true, by people who will not just scam money from the victims in many different ways, but do far worse things to other innocents.

We don't need voter id or age verification laws, we need laws that make any form of deliberate online deception for profit a crime punishable by jail time.

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