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I listened to literally dozens of scam call victim complaints over the years; most were just questioning the validity of the calls
they had got but some folks actually were conned out of money. I remember my first one was around 1995, when a local
businessman called the police to report getting a fax from a Nigerian Prince who needed help to quietly move about $20,000,000
into the country. Then there was the girl who actually bought a car online from a completely made-up car dealership in another
state (c0mplete with a very real-looking website with cars for sales) and she had lost $7,000 dollars to the scammer. And there
were the too-numerous-to-count folks who said the IRS had just called them, or the Federal Marshall’s Office, or the Social
Security Administration, or the local Sheriff’s Department was coming to handcuff them. The aggravatingly sad thing is that all
of these people, I know they must have seen all the consumer advocates on tv like at least several times a year telling them To
Not To Give Yo Money To Strangers but then some of them went and did it anyway. Also I had to endure a lot of the victims
insist that giving me the phone number of the suspects was the one vital clue that would completely solve the case. Guess what.
Having a phone number of a scammer does not help for shit. Most of the numbers are good for only a week or so anywhere,
most of them were in a completely different state, and a lot were not even in this country.

This next glorious scam started with a scammer in who knows what state, probably going down a list of small towns in America
and he stopped his finger when he got to “Poulsbo, Washington, population 9,800.” “Poulsbo?” I could hear him trying to
pronounce it. “Poulsboro? What kind of a hick town is THAT? This sounds like my next target is what it sounds like.” So he then
called one of the smaller grocery stores in town. He totally lucked out when his phone call was answered by his ideal perfect
dumb employee. In this case, a woman in her 40’s who really should have known better. She should have stayed at the register
and kept ringing up customers but I guess there was a lull in the action (it was a pretty small store) and so she picked up the
phone and got into a conversation with “Agent Smith” calling from Western Union. His voice was persuasive and assured. “Hi
this is Agent Smith, Western Union headquarters, ID number 4392LL Alpha and it’s time for a critical but routine software
upgrade of your money transfer terminal station there, I need you to go log in and prepare the system to receive standard and
required upgrade codes blah blah blah..” and the stupid woman actually fell for it and logged in and entered the “proper codes
to remotely audit the index file” and at “Agent Smith’s” encouragement she somehow wound up hitting the “transfer/send”
button a number of times, not realizing that every time she hit that she was in fact (and of course) having money from the store’s
reserve account sucked out and away into the void, out of the store and gone, because the beauty of Western Union is that
electronic money leaves one location and can be picked up and cashed out at literally any other location, all one needs is the
permission code to get the cash. “Agent Smith” was so smooth, he didn’t even arouse any suspicion until a full week later when
the store manager just about had a heart attack when he noticed the store’s Western Union fund had been drained. Twelve
thousand dollars was the amount that should have been there, and that was money owned by the store owner/manager, not
Western Union. It was at that point they figured out what happened. The manager called the police, I showed up, and I realized
that “Agent Smith” was obviously going to pick up his cash not all at once in a big store that had surveillance cameras, but here
and there in small amounts leaving no name or face behind, again, in wh0-knows-what-state, probably though on the east coast.
Or Midwest. Good job, Agent Smith. I was actually quite impressed with him. For five minutes’ work, he made twelve grand, tax
free. He’d only have to do that like once a month to make a pretty good living.