How far do people go to feed a gambling addiction?
In this story we have a young bank teller, 28 years old lady, who stole 28,000$ from four different elders who were suffering from health and cognitive problems. Her goal was to fuel a gambling addiction, as presented by the defense at the court.
Families must be attentive to their elders when going to the bank and dealing with money in general. Scammers and thieves are everywhere and always ready to take advantage of the vulnerability of such individuals at an advanced age.
A similar case happened to my grams, who has little knowledge of technology. She accesses her bank account via her cell phone. One day she received a call from the bank manager telling her to go to the branch urgently. From what she said, the call was intercepted by someone who claimed to be a bank employee. He then asked for sensitive account information, such as the password to access the app and her credit card information. Unfortunately, she was tricked and gave up all the access details.
The result was a withdrawal about of $1000 debited from her account and a loan that I don't remember the amount, but it was very high. Unfortunately, she was alone at home. There was no one to stop her from doing what she did.
Deceiving the elderly and other vulnerable people is a strategy often adopted by criminals. They carry out these scams without much effort. Unless the elderly person is not accompanied when they carry out the scam, they can succeed.