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ON MENTAL ILLNESS: Vulnerability to Scammers

Jack Bragen
Saturday August 19, 2017 - 10:00:00 AM

This week, I am going to discuss something that, one hopes, doesn't happen every day. Being a victim of identity theft and/or financial crimes will probably occur in our lives at some point. It should not make you afraid to pick up the phone when it rings, turn on a computer, or use a debit card to buy a soda at a store. However, these are some things of which we ought to be aware. 

Persons with psychiatric problems could often be seen by criminals, con artists, and scammers, as easy prey. Mental health workers teach us to become naive, mostly defenseless, and excessively trusting.  

Medication can make a mentally ill person pliable and malleable. And we've been taught that we should not get aggressive, that we should not become paranoid, and that we should believe what we are told. This doesn't leave us very equipped to deal with some of the deceptions and roughness that may sometimes appear in our lives.  

There are a number of common scams that circulate in the U.S., most of them propagated on the internet or through phone calls. In reference to the phone calls, some are automated while some, apparently, are "live." A few of the recent automated ones are designed to fool people into believing a real person is on the other end. I am guessing that this is a way of gathering thousands of names and the associated personal information necessary to do identity theft at a future point.  

In some instances, lonely men, and sometimes but probably less often women, are victims of "catfish" schemes. They (the perpetrator) might send a photo and might have a hard luck story. They may promise love in return for giving them financial help. They might manipulate the victim into giving away thousands of dollars. The photo may not be that of the actual person on the other end. You don't know who you're dealing with--it could easily be someone in a foreign country. As soon as the victim has wired away all of his or her money, abruptly, the person promising love is no longer interested, or may disappear entirely.  

Other schemes rely on a pretense of being a legitimate financial or other institution. I recently witnessed a friend take a call from someone pretending to be Wells Fargo, offering a credit card, and asking for information. I asked my friend to give me the phone number of the caller who was supposedly from Wells Fargo. I googled the number and discovered the sad truth. (I would have tried to steer my friend away from the swindle, but there was no opportunity for me to do that.)  

I received a number of phony emails of someone pretending to be Stripe. (FYI: Stripe is essentially the same idea as Paypal, and offers means of handling transactions through the internet.)  

The phony Stripe emails repeatedly claimed that I had been paid funds. I contacted the real Stripe, and they put a stop to the emails. It is in their interest not to have scammers impersonate them. I was very suspicious from the start, because the emails didn't include my name. Secondly, I had no reason to believe that I would be getting funds through Stripe.  

About six years ago, I received a death threat on my email. The person writing the email said that if I paid him more than the person paying him to kill me, he wouldn't kill me. I phoned the Martinez PD, and I printed a copy of the email for them. This email wasn't about doing harm to me or singling me out because of revolutionary writing or something, it was simply someone, probably in a foreign country, trying to get some money.  

Another type of swindle, which is probably legal, consists of receiving credit card offers in the mail--not the legit ones, but those that include prohibitive fees.  

If you have good credit, you might receive mail offers that are legitimate from companies that you have heard of. There is nothing wrong with this, if you are financially fit for the credit. If not, you should shred the offers.  

Credit card offers are circulating, from unknown companies that you've probably never heard of, and they have bogus, but legal fees--that you can read in the disclosure part of the offer.  

Often, the fees amount to as much as or more than the credit limit of the card. For example, "Setup fee." And they get more imaginative than that--in the names they give to the fees. This is worse than mere predatory lending. That's why you always need to read the fine print. 

If you use a computer or a telephone, or if you receive USPS mail, you must be ready to deal with the scammers, con artists and identity thieves. This is where the naiveté and the cooperativeness, taught by the mental health treatment system, are not our friends.  

Being excessively passive in life will probably get you nothing, or worse. Medication may have us "zoned out" to some extent, to where it is hard to be an active participant in life. However, at least some of the time, we need to stand up for ourselves, because no one else is going to do that for us.  


Jack Bragen is author of "Instructions for Dealing with Schizophrenia: A Self-Help Manual" and other titles, available on the LULU.com and Amazon.com websites.