It’s another one of those weekends – as duty officer. Due to
a strange scheduling quirk, I had to man the phone again. I took over as being
the one who scheduled it, and there was a snafu in early November done by the
previous person and to fix it, I had to take over a shift this week. Sadly,
there was another snafu over Thanksgiving week and I’m doing it again.
Anyway, I knew I got off fairly easy last time and would be
in for some of the regular stuff we get this time around, and I was right. Scams
are big here, and I’ve had two of them. They were fairly similar.
The first one was some woman who told me her fiancé had come
to Istanbul in May for a two-week job on an oil rig in the Black Sea with 200
other people, 50 Americans and 150 Turks. Something about not having proper
equipment and wiring a total of $450k (it was unclear as to if it was her money
or his; she said it was “from his foundation account.”) Then something about an inspection and not
being allowed to leave the oil rig, followed by a song-and-dance about the 50
men (of whom fiancé was in charge of) not being able to leave, something something.
Basically it came down to her having to come up with money to get them all
home. She’d just sent her last $1400 or something like that. Another wife, with
whom she allegedly was emailing, complained to the company and then “they cut
off all the food to all the men.”
Doesn’t sound fishy at all, does it? Holy cow. Red flags all
over the place. I asked the fiance’s name and she gave me a very common name,
saying he was from Jacksonville. I asked his passport number. No clue. Names of
his employees? No idea. Name of his employer? He was a contractor, so there wasn’t
one. The thing was beyond insane. She
told me about a General Somebody Somebody who was “in charge of sending U.S.
troops to Iraq” … yeah, right. He had a phone she couldn’t call but only text
to. And this sounded legitimate to her.
So I did my due diligence and reported it, to which it came
back scam. The person I reported it to asked me if I’d asked the big scam
question, which is, “Have you met this individual in person?” I knew that, but
I couldn’t bring myself to ask if she’d met the man she called her finace. I
mean, WHO is engaged to someone they haven’t touched? Well…
Upon follow-up by email, I asked that very question and she
declined to answer it. I also asked for his full name and she came back and
added a middle initial. I replied to the email and asked for her fiance’s
middle name and date of birth, adding that without further information it
sounded like a scam. I haven’t heard from her since.
Last night, I had a similar one, but this was a woman
calling about her husband, whom she assured me she did put him on the plane
herself. But like the first one, he’d come over in May for something short and
as of September some other wrinkle appeared and then all of a sudden, at 9:30
p.m. on a Friday night, she called with a whopper of a tale. These things are
so implausible that I really feel like I’m the target instead of the person
calling.
This one believes that her husband has been arrested and
that the police are emailing and texting her to send them money. It’s like no,
they do not do that. What they would do, however, is call us. And in the month
that has lapsed since you believe this occurred, they have not called us.
In the course of trying to figure this out, I learned that
the man was 72 years old – a bit old to travel for an engineering gig – and the
wife had absolutely no idea of his passport number, his employer, his flight
information or the hotel he allegedly stayed at for two months. She didn’t have
a voice phone number for him, but had a number of a burner phone used just for
texting. I tried to find out when the last time she spoke to him and she kept
saying she’d been texting. I was like, uh, anyone can pretend to be anyone on a
text – when did you last speak to him? She had no idea.
Seriously people, please travel smart. Leave a copy of your
passport with somebody. Give your itinerary to someone. And if your loved one
is traveling for, oh, two months, and doesn’t offer up the information, GET IT.
And if you have none of the above and cannot help your own
cause, do not call me after hours or on a weekend to fix it for you. It’s not
going to happen.
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