Los Angeles: the Scam Capital of America

I’d just arrived home from work and was unlocking my front door when the man jogged up, worry in his eyes.

“Sorry to bother you. My name’s Gary. We’re neighbors. . . . My house is down there”--he pointed--”just around the corner. That’s my truck. You’ve probably seen my kids. . . . God, this is really embarrassing.” Words to that effect, anyway.

Gary wanted my help. He explained how Bobby, his 3-year-old, had a respiratory condition and was suffering an acute attack--how Bobby lay in bed as he and his wife wiped the mucus from their boy’s nose and mouth. His prescription really helps, Gary said, but they’d run out. It cost $18 and he only had a couple of bucks in hand. The jerks at the credit union told him to come back Monday--he was just a couple of minutes late.

I reached for my wallet. Then my neighbor remembered they were almost out of a second medication, a little cheaper. And Bobby liked to take it with apple juice. When I handed my neighbor two $20 bills, he thanked me effusively. And I felt like one heck of a nice guy.

Perhaps I’m an easy mark, but my “neighbor” was such good actor. All I could think of was sick little Bobby and how can I help? It was only seconds later, as Gary strode toward his truck, that I noticed a little bounce in his step and realized I’d been had.

“Once your emotions have been tapped into, your logic takes a vacation,” says Sgt. Barbara White of the Sheriff’s Department fraud and forgery detail. “Your brain dysfunctions.”

More than a decade has passed since my encounter with Gary the Grifter. These days, Gary could be standing by a money machine somewhere, sharing his tale of woe, which would now include a lost ATM card. Now I’d probably say sorry. Yet I’d still wonder about that invisible sick child and wonder whether I’d done further damage to my chances of making it to heaven.

A letter from Jerry Smith, a Canoga Park insurance man, got me thinking about scams, great and small, that seem to be everywhere. Greater Los Angeles has been called the nation’s scam central. It might be the sucker capital of the world.

Jerry Smith wanted to share a story concerning his mother-in-law, Vivian Ramsey.

Mrs. Ramsey is a 79-year-old Van Nuys resident, a widow with four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Her husband died a few years ago. When the phone rang a couple of weeks ago, the caller asked to speak to her husband.

After Mrs. Ramsey explained why that wouldn’t be possible, the caller expressed sympathy, introduced himself and explained that he was representing an insurance company that had gone into bankruptcy. Mr. Ramsey, he explained, had taken out a $5,000 policy in 1972; apparently there’d been a mix-up. So Mrs. Ramsey was entitled to her payment.

The insurance rep said he would put the money into an escrow account. There would be small processing fee. Once we receive $135, he explained, we’ll send you your $5,000.

“I told him, ‘You send me some paperwork or literature on it, and I will turn it over to my daughter. She’s a lawyer and she’ll take care of it,’ ” Mrs. Ramsey recalled.

“Well, right when I said ‘it,’ he just hung up.”

Truth is, Mrs. Ramsey’s daughter isn’t a lawyer at all.

Jerry Smith wrote the same day his mother-in-law got that call. Being in the insurance business himself, “that might have been what made me extra mad,” he says. “There’s always somebody out trying to screw old people.”

Scammers prey on ignorance, greed, human decency. Often they call from telemarketing boiler rooms.

“If it’s too good to be true, you can guarantee it’s too good to be true,” Sgt. White says. “If they say they’re collecting for something, that ‘for’ is the 90% middleman.”

The elderly, often lonely, perhaps more trusting, are often targeted. In recent years, law enforcement officials say, scores of Southern California residents, many of them elderly, have fallen victim to “the bank examiner scheme.”

It works like this: A man posing as a law enforcement official or a bank examiner asks the unwitting customer to assist in catching a bank employee suspected of embezzlement by withdrawing substantial funds. The “examiner” instructs the victim not to tell anyone the reason for the withdrawal so as not to tip off the “suspect.”

The “examiner” then marks the bills, issues a receipt, says the money will be redeposited and disappears. Often, police say, the victims are too embarrassed to tell friends and neighbors.

You don’t have to be elderly to know that feeling.

*

Sgt. White admired the way Mrs. Ramsey handled the bogus insurance rep. I asked her about another recent incident.

A friend was driving in the West Valley when she made a slow right turn and heard something strike the side of her car. She stopped and encountered a scruffy pedestrian who, obviously, had staged this collision. He told her he was hurt, but for $50 would forget all about it.

This scam was blatant, not artful. My friend thought about calling the police, but she had her teen-age daughter with her and just wanted to go home. And she worried how an accident report might affect her car insurance. The quickest way to get rid of him, she figured, was to pay him off. When she later called the LAPD to report the incident, she was scolded, and not gently, for not calling earlier.

Sgt. White suggests that my friend should have conned the con man.

Tell him you want to make a full report--that you need his I.D. Tell him you’ll need to call the police. Say: “Don’t go anywhere. Let me get my camera out of the trunk. Please let me take a picture of you. I feel awful about this. I insist on reporting this to my insurance company. I won’t take no for an answer.”

Very soon, White says, the grifter would be walking away.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.