You can all blame my client

[heinous_bitca.livejournal.com]

A few weeks back now, I had a client call me in a desperate panic. (I do computer consulting on the side.) She was trying to scan a check to send to her bank and was having problems getting the scanner to work.

Why did she need to scan a check, you ask?

Because this relatively tech-and-RL-savvy 70-year-old woman fell victim to a cyberscam.

Yes, one of those "I'll send you a check for $N amount and you can keep half/quarter/three-quarters" scams. And the bank wanted to see a copy of the check.

I didn't have time to get into the whole "HOW DUMB ARE YOU THAT YOU FELL FOR THIS?" with her on the cell phone. She put her older son on the phone and I tried, while commuting home (husband was driving) to help him figure out why he could scan the check and not save it. I wasn't able to help, but promised if they would call me later, I would try and connect to her MacBookPro via my husband's MacBookPro and go through iChat to control her computer and figure out what they were missing with saving the scan.

I never actually heard back from them that day, or all weekend. A week later, I got an email from her saying that they had figured it out, and asking about another issue.

I don't know what I'm going to say to her once she needs me consulting her in person again. Part of me wants to ask her how she fell for this (I'm HOPING that it was a subtle scam, and not the ones I still get in my spam mailbox), part of me wants to grab her and shake her and say DID YOU EVEN TALK TO YOUR HUSBAND ABOUT THIS?, and part of me wants to just throw my hands up in the air and give up on her.

So if you ever think, "Why do they keep sending out these emails? Doesn't everyone know by now that they're scams?", now you can say you have heard of someone who fell for one, and fell recently. So yes, that's why we still get them. They still manage to hook in a few suckers.