I almost got scammed on the phone last week!!

     I think of myself as someone who is sophisticated enough to recognize a phone scam.  I remember getting Nigerian email scams years ago and couldn't believe how well they worked.  Well, last week I fell for a phone scam for 15 minutes.  I don't usually pick up calls on our landline because it is usually just solicitors.  I picked up last week's call because it had an area code of one of my kids.  When I picked up a voice said "Hi, know who this is?"  I mistakenly said my grandson's name.  At first, I was surprised that he would call me out of the blue but I was caught off guard.  I didn't seem to recognize his voice but called me by my unusual "grandfather" name.  He said he had a cold and his voice has changed in the past year.  He asked me how I was doing and how Grandma was doing.  After a little chit-chat, he mentioned he had been in a minor accident but he was OK and the other car only had a little damage to their door.  I knew he didn't have his driver's license so I asked why he was in trouble unless he was driving.  He said his friend let him drive.  It was starting to get weird but I played along.  I asked where he was now and he said he was at the courthouse and had a lawyer who planned to get him off with just a $50 fine.  At this point, the red flags were going off in my mind.  Why would someone be in court the same day as the accident and how did he get a lawyer so quick.  I asked if he had talked to his parents yet and he said he was too embarrassed.  I asked to speak to his attorney.  Another older sounding person came on the call.  I asked how my grandson found him so quickly and he said the police had given my grandson his phone number.  Before there was any request for me to wire any money I told the person who was supposedly a lawyer that I thought this was a scam and I would be reporting the phone number.  He became indignant and said that he was only trying to help my grandson.  I finally told him I was hanging up because I wasn't stupid.

     So afterward I wondered how he connected me to my grandson.  My grandson and I don't share a social network platform.  And how did they know that my grandson had a special name for me?  Then it was pointed out to me that the Baltimore Sun had carried an article 12 years ago about grandchildren having special names for their grandparents.  I had been contacted by a Sun reporter who was doing the article because I was running a grandparent program in Baltimore.  It was a coincidence that my only grandchild at the time had a special name for me.  The reporter interviewed a couple of other grandparents that I referred but the article focused on me and even used one of the pictures I supplied them.  This was back before we thought about not having a picture of a child in the newspaper.  My grandson was excited to see his picture in the paper.  Little did I think that the article would come back in such a notorious way in the future.  In relating my story to others I found out how they too had scam calls about bailing out a grandchild.