Greg's Corner

Scammer stalks victim through pizza delivery

By Greg Collier

Two of the many things we try to hammer home about scammers is they will stoop to any length to scam someone, and once they find a victim, they’ll try to scam them again. We’ve seen scammers show up at funerals pretending to collect money for the deceased. We’ve also seen scammers pose as the families of crime victims, so they can open a GoFundMe account to attempt to garner donations. In other scams, we’ve seen scammers that repeatedly set out to fleece the same victim after they were successfully scammed. Today’s story has a little bit of both of those aspects of scams within it.

An elderly man had been scammed for thousands of dollars. While there aren’t details on what scam it was, there’s enough evidence to suggest it was the grandparent scam. The local sheriff’s office tried to help the man from being scammed again. They suggested he turn off his cell phone, and the man also changed his landline phone number.

The scammer had so much information about the man that the scammer knew the pizza parlor the man liked to order from. The scammer then had a pizza delivered to the man’s home. The scammer also had a note included with the pizza asking the man to call his ‘grandson’ with the scammer’s phone number attached.

In this South Carolina county alone, over $1.3 million has been lost to scams in the past year. That amount is probably even more if you consider the losses that weren’t reported. According to the sheriff’s office, arrests are few and far between, and it becomes more a plan of defense rather than one of apprehension. They also say that the best way to prevent yourself from becoming the victim of a scam is time. Essentially, don’t give out any money or information without taking some time to assess the situation first.