October 9, 2013 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • Page 19 Why the Grandparent Scam works Brrrrring! “Hello, is this Mrs. Smith? It is? Madame, this is Sergeant Preston of the Northwest Mounted Police and his dog, Yukon King. We’re holding your grandson, Algernon, for a drunken driving accident in which an elderly Eskimo was injured and his igloo was destroyed. Unless we get $14,000, your grandson Algernon will not be represented by a lawyer at the hearing and may wind up in prison with hardened offenders until his trial sometime later in the century. Let me give you a number and you can send us the money immediately by Western Union.” Would you fall for this? If you had a grandson named Algernon and had never heard about the Grandparent Scam, you just might. The Grandparent Scam is one of the meanest scams out there, short of actual threats of violence. Get-rich-quick schemes, nasty as they are, target people who have ample money. So do the Nigerian inheritance scams. Some people even target their own relatives. One guy who was pulled in by the police some months ago told friends and relatives that, if he could get his hands on some quick money for real estate closings, he could pay them back with sizable interest in a matter of days or weeks. The properties he said he was closing on were not even for sale. A telephone call to a Realtor could have disclosed this information, but people tend to trust relatives and friends. The Grandparent Scam is remarkably common. Many instances have taken place in Ridgewood, and some in Glen Rock. Wyckoff is an especially notable target, despite the fact that police in all three towns responsibly post warnings urging people to call the local police first or talk to Alger- non before they send any money. If the grandparents send the first increment of money, generally in the range of $10,000 to $20,000, the caller will hit them up for another increment of similar size for some other expense. This is not an Amazon herbal remedy scheme or a fake donation ploy for the widows and orphans of Navy SEALS. Those were despicable, but they were small change. The Grandparent Scam is for some big money. Shortly, the grandson turns up at home or back in the college dorm. The grandson reports that he had not been arrested, and the grandparents are out a very sizable amount of money. The scammers obviously target affluent towns like those in northwest Bergen County. Con artists gather infor- mation in advance. Social media outlets are a great place to find details about college-age kids, including whose grand- parents live in wealthy communities. Once the phone call is made, the scammer has three psychological edges over the hapless victim. First, honesty really is the best policy, at least in the long run. People who can afford to stay around here once the kids are out of school probably got that way by keeping their word and by running legal businesses or responsible behavior in their professions. Crooks often do well in the short term, but when the bottom falls out, they hit the skids rather quickly. Because the grandparents are honest, they expect that anyone who calls them knowing their name and posing as a law enforcement officer or attorney is also honest. Second, the love of children is a healthy natural instinct that comports rather well with the ability to make and save money. I recently saw a documentary on PBS in which polar bears, driven south of their usual range by global warming, showed up on the nesting grounds of migratory birds and started to eat the birds’ eggs and chicks. The adult birds attacked the polar bears, pecking their faces and their rumps until blood was visible. A skua has no real chance against a polar bear -- but the need to defend its offspring is stronger than fear, and stronger than logic. Healthy people feel the same way. Love them or hate them, people with sizable savings accounts and respectable addresses usually care about their children and grandchildren. Runaway par- ents rarely prosper in the long term. Third is the sinister secret: Mothers-in-law and daugh- ters-in-law almost never get along and almost never agree on the best way to raise kids. I have mentioned this to men and women who knew they would not be quoted, and they all agreed with me behind their spouses’ backs. People of the generation 10 years ahead of mine -- the grandparents of college-aged kids -- generally believe in a lot more dis- cipline than people in the generation 10 years younger than mine. If a mother-in-law disagrees with her daughter-in- law’s tactics in raisings kids, and bluntly does not trust her daughter-in-law to raise the kids right, a kid’s drunk driv- ing or drug arrest in a foreign country or a far-away state is just what the mother-in-law would expect. The chance to rush to the rescue not only allows the grandmother to vali- date her concerns about the daughter-in-law’s mothering skills, but also allows her to demonstrate the importance of thrift: “I can afford to bail Algernon out of prison because Hubby and I saved our money instead of spending it all like you did!” The ability to control both the healthy instinct to protect the young and the more insidious instinct to show up a sub- conscious rival represents a real hurdle. Some people have trouble with it. Another sad factor also intervenes in this scam. Some older folks have such sporadic contact with their own grandchildren that they cannot recognize their voices, at least not in a moment of panic. Faced with the need to protect the grandchild, the subconscious desire to show up the in-law, and the inability to recognize the voice of a seldom-seen grandson under stress, the grandparents head for Western Union and the money flies off to the tropics and is not seen again. Commendably, so many of these cases have occurred in recent months that even Western Union has begun to warn people not to send the money. Police invariably warn the grandparents not to send the money unless they are abso- lutely sure the grandson is in custody. Most of the time, the grandson is safe, somewhere far from the scene of the fraudulent non-existent drunk driving or drug arrest, and would be better off if the grandparents put the money in a trust fund for him. Accidents do happen, but phone calls from people you do not know describing drunk-driving collisions or drug arrests in foreign countries are not accidents: They are the harbingers of one of the meanest scams in the business. Ramsey Town pays tribute The Borough of Ramsey honored Timothy McGill last week. (See additional coverage on page 3.)