A septuagenarian who came within a hair’s breadth of falling into the trap of mischievous crooks who set up a whole story involving her grandson with the sole aim of extracting $4,000 from him invites people to take advantage of the holidays to discuss with their loved ones fraud tactics to better protect yourself.
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“I thought I was never going to get caught in my life. I am intelligent, I am informed, I had already talked about it with people around me. In my head, it could be seen as a fraud, but no,” confides Francine Forget Plante.
One morning, she received a call: “Hello Grandma,” said a familiar voice on the line.
“I recognized my grandson’s voice. Same way of speaking. It’s like it’s him for real. Lord, it can’t be,” says the lady, who therefore suspected nothing.
The person who posed as his relative said that he had just had a road accident while using his cell phone while driving. He needed approximately $4,250 to pay his bail.
“They’re going to put me in jail, Grandma, and if I don’t want to go to jail, I need bail,” the crook told her. “You think about it afterwards and you can see that it doesn’t make sense,” she lets fall.
Save your grandson
She then spoke with a fake lawyer, who had a calm, reassuring voice. So she rushed to the bank to make the withdrawal.
“At the time, I didn’t have time to think about anything other than saving my grandson,” she explains.
Francine Forget Plante
Photo Agence QMI, JOEL LEMAY
And as the lawyer had also suggested to her on the phone, the septuagenarian invented a little lie at the bank counter to withdraw such an amount without sowing doubts among the employees.
“I was warned: ‘Don’t say that the money is for your grandson, because that could hinder the proceedings in his case.’ Me, I just didn’t want him to have a file [criminel] tainted,” she explains to Newspaper.
She even told the story to her sister-in-law during the day, who also fell for it. “We were both encouraging each other, believing in it,” she says.
A few hours later, her grandson’s lawyer called her back and offered to send “a bail agent” to her home to collect the money and thus avoid her having to go to Montreal.
“I can still see myself saying to him: “You are very kind.” I thought he was doing a good deal, he was doing me a favor,” she remembers, heaving a sigh of discouragement.
Questioning
The bail agent was outside her house when she finally had “a lot of doubts.” He looked far too young and poorly dressed to be an employee of the justice system, she describes.
Mme Forget Plante therefore did not open the door and instead called the Longueuil police. Officers immediately came to her home.
“We are well aware of the stratagem and the phenomenon. We make it our duty to act quickly. Fraudsters put pressure and play with the feeling of urgency to make people vulnerable,” explains Sergeant François Boucher, spokesperson for the Longueuil agglomeration police department.
Francine Forget Plante with François Boucher, spokesperson for the Longueuil urban police service.
Photo Agence QMI, JOEL LEMAY
This type of fraud brings its share of psychological repercussions and can rob an elderly person of all their savings, he adds.
Francine Forget Plante considers herself lucky for this turn of events, but she still feels ashamed and insulted at having been caught: “They really come looking for your emotions. My sanity had completely disappeared.”
She advises having a discussion on the subject with loved ones during the holiday season: “I still blame myself. We need to talk about it so that we can all be more alert. If my story can prevent just one person from being defrauded, it will be a victory,” she concludes.