Some scam artists are known for coming up with fresh pitches, such as already trying to exploit the disaster in Japan, but others aren’t too clever or proud to mindlessly repeat the old ones.
Here are some of the most recent ploys that targeted Clark County residents:
- On March 8, an 81-year-old woman who lives in Vancouver’s McLoughlin Heights got a phone call from someone who sounded like a girl with a childlike voice and had no foreign accent.
The caller blatantly asked the local woman for her new credit-card number, saying that a purchase the local woman made didn’t go through.
When the elderly woman asked whom the girl worked for, she wouldn’t say.
Before long, the woman said, “I hung up on her.”
- Last month, a man who spoke broken English called a local woman to say he was a debt collector and she owed money to someone.
She told him she had no debts to anyone, but he persisted, asking for the last four digits of her Social Security number.
“I called him some names,” she said. “I said, ‘You’re nothing but a low-down scammer.’ I said, ‘I’m going to turn you in’ and he hung up on me.”
