Re: Phone Cheats
Originally Posted by
Meg
->
I am amazed that people are so gullible
.
Unfortunately Meg many people of our age group and over are either gullible or just so trusting of what they believe is an authority that they fall into the trap too readily.
My MIL is almost 90 and she was a book-keeper for much of the time in her working life but we found that she'd been mislead into believing that donations she gave to well-known charities were one-off payments.
They were not.
She had £110+ going out of her bank account every month and 3 of those regular payments were suspect - out of a total of 7, plus 3 annual payments - she'd paid out £1412 in a year from her meagre income.
The worst part was when we asked her why she was paying out monthly, for example, £34 to one major,
genuine Charity - she didn't even realise that she was.
We found paperwork sent to her, unsolicited, from respectable Charities but the wording and tiny check-boxes were so confusing it wasn't hard to realise how easily she'd been duped, often on unsolicited 'phone calls that she'd forgotten about.
We also found other, more dubious ones based overseas that she paid out to and she had no idea who they were or how she had signed-up to them; a charity for orphans in the Philippines run by, apparently, Nuns was one that caught our eye.
She gave them £20 per month and all the correspondence that she had, which she kept, was hand-written!
There were 3 payment she made monthly and 1 annually to foreign charities that neither she or we had ever heard of at all.
The saddest thing for my wife is the fact that her mother had been a book-keeper; someone you might expect to be a little more clued-up on finance, but she's
the opposite and does not seem to understand that her income, after all essentials are deducted, actually leaves her with only £42 per week to live on - all she sees is the bottom line on her bank statement.
She doesn't seem to realise that she has been spending more than she had coming in and that balance is going down alarmingly but she's now telling my wife on the 'phone that she's
destroying her bank statements, so we're even more worried.
Why is she doing that?
It's people like her Meg, in their
thousands that are 'fleeced' all the time. stevmk2