I received an email from a someone I would describe as a distant relative of my deceased wife saying, “I had a fall and broke my femur.” Other than for one email a while back, I hadn’t heard from this person in the 4.5 years since my wife died.
My wife was close with her relative. I was cordial, accommodating and appropriately social whenever we were together, but we were not friends. So after my wife died and the relative expressed condolences, sent a card and made a few phone calls, it’s understandable that our contact faded.
Still, when I received this email out of the blue, I responded with my sympathy and best wishes for a speedy recovery. Even though I know this person has family, medical and financial support readily accessible and that my assistance is not needed, I have enough class to know how to respond.
It was odd though, to hear from her after all this time.
Until I received the next email asking for me to send a gift card to her niece.
Ha!
I should have suspected.
It wasn’t my distant ex-relative, it was a scammer.
I deleted the messages and blocked the addresses.
I went to report it to the FCC, but the form was so long and stupid that I stopped halfway through. The FCC isn’t going to do sh!t about it anyway.
Usually, I spot scammers immediately. The only reason I didn’t catch this one is because I know a little bit about the elderly, falls, morphine and technical challenges that older people often have. I should have caught it, but I chalked the new email address and somewhat vague message up to age and infirmity.
That won’t happen again.
It’s hard to fool me. As a loner, there are very few ruses about relatives that might trip me up. I have no children, very little family and am quite communicative with my close tight circle of friends. Long lost people never reach out to me.
It’s interesting though. I just listened to a Freakonomics podcast about a “your grandchild was in a accident” scam that fooled a man into sending thousands to a scammer. They had spoofed his grandchild’s voice using AI (suspected) and clips from social media.
Good luck trying that on me. I hate kids.
Postscript:
Because I was disappointed in myself for having gotten fooled by the first email, I reread it today to see what I missed.
Here was the trick that got me – The scammer made the email appear to be sent from the ex-relative’s actual email address. Because this contact is in my address book, it did not throw up any red flags. But, when I hit reply, the “reply-to” address was so some bogus gmail account that was similar to the person’s actual address.
I am going to see if I can create a rule to block any emails with a different sent-from/reply-to to email address. If that’s not possible, I’ll be checking for this the next time I receive a suspicious email.