Scams and Cons at Any Age, Part II: The Canadian Menace

“Blame Canada.” – The South Park Movie

Please help stop the senseless slaughter of Canadians that voluntarily give their lives so your pancakes can be tasty!  I sent them $20 real dollars, not those Canadian ones.  Or . . . could this be a scam?

Last Wednesday we discussed scams that you’ll run into at different ages.  We made it from birth to age 22 and listed some of the scams that you’ll be exposed to (Scams and Cons at Any Age, Part I, as told by Admiral Ackbar).  Today we’ll keep going, and if you don’t find the information useful, I promise a full refund of all money that you’ve paid directly to me to read this blog (note to self:  when I edit this stuff into a book remember to edit that last sentence out).

Early Career:

You’ve graduated from college, or have opened a small but successful business, or you’re pursuing a trade like welding and you’re 24.  Life is wide open!  You’ve successfully avoided college debt through one way or another, or maybe you have a modest debt that you can repay without too much difficulty every month.

Let’s go get scammed!

The easiest way to get legally scammed is your choice of partner.  If you’re with a bad one, you’re going to end up paying for it for (potentially) decades.  If your spouse is particularly unemployable and you are really employable, some states (the Internet in 2018 says Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, and West Virginia) allow for lifetime alimony.  So, if you have the bad sense to marry a gold digger?  It will outlive the cat and could last as long as that herpes he or she brought home.

How birth works in Canada.  Since all children are socialist and owned by the government, it’s okay if you pick up several that aren’t yours to raise if you live in Canada.

Another way (men only) you can get scammed is through paternity.  Yes, you can be found legally liable to raise Some Other Dude’s Kid (SODK) if your blushing bride is a wanderin’ if you’re married when she gives birth and you claim the kid, or don’t object within some arbitrarily short period of time.  And lets’ face it, babies all sort of look the same, so the chances of you missing that deadline are pretty significant.  In the worst case scenario, you end up paying child support and alimony when your wife starts shacking up with the Some Other Dude.  Yeah, I don’t personally know anyone this happened to, but I’ve read about several cases.  And this is perfectly legal in every state.

Thank heaven you’re not French – they explicitly have outlawed paternity testing so it is illegal to check to make sure your mademoiselle hasn’t taken to the boudoir with some other Pierre.   But that’s okay, being a father is just a social construct, right?

The easy way to get to work in Canada isn’t by mass transit, it’s by moose transit.

The next big scam is car purchasing.  I’ve written at length about my philosophy on car purchasing.  You can find some representative posts here plus results of my bad experiences.  Give them a read – they will save you thousands of dollars . . .

Repeat After Me: Never Buy a New Car (and other lessons for young adults)

“Wreck. Big wreck.” – Long, Sixteen Candles

Will you buy a Tesla™ 3?  You already have.

I’m gonna tell you about an accident, and I don’t wanna hear “act of God.” – Jack Burton, Big Trouble in Little China

Outside of bad relationships, I think new cars are the biggest scam that a young early career person faces.  What kind of a bargain is a vehicle that you drive off the lot that immediately becomes less valuable?

And if you’re reading this blog, the chances of you falling for a Nigerian-Prince level scam are nearly zero.  The writers of those scams specifically put misspellings into the emails so that smart people ignore them – the laughable quality and easy verification that the scam is a lie the point of the scam in the first place.  The last thing the scammers want is a smart person to deal with – the email itself is an IQ test.  Only the scammable need apply.

As it is, the “Nigerian-Prince” scam accounts for 48% of Nigeria’s gross domestic product.  And I hope you didn’t fall for that fact that I just made up on the spot – ha, I bet you believe that there’s an actual Nigeria now.  Ha!  But THEREZ GOOD newS, I have SUM OF $48 MILLION USD that UNKLE BRADLEE left in trust for me and YOU ONLIE NEED TO PROVIDEE your bank account routing information for me to wire it 2 u.

Middle to Late Career:

You’ve reached your peak earning potential.  You’ve been scammed a few times, like me, most of them completely legal versions.  For the most part, you’re either broke or you’ve grown wary of anything that sounds too good to be true, like Social Security or that George R. R. Martin will ever finish the Game of Thrones™ series (Actual Book Series Title:  An Infinitely Long Story Consisting of People Talking in Rooms Because I Can’t Figure Out How to End It Song of Fire and Ice®) before his heart finishes him or that there’s a new version of The Gong Show™.  There is, in fact, a new version of The Gong Show® and it is fabulous.  George R.R. Martin, however, appears to be doing absolutely anything but writing.  Maybe he could be a judge on The Gong Show©?

It seems as if Dr. Phil has been busy?  I like the new Canadian flag, a LOT!

Dating scams seem to hit this group a lot.  Why?  After being married, and now being single, scammers can target the richest age group with a pretty significant emotion:  love and longing.  I’ve read on the Internets about folks spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on their never met in person Internet lovers.  While some of these folks do get prosecuted, it’s pretty hard to convict them unless they’re fraudulent in a pretty flagrant manner, especially since the victim willingly sends the money, and, in some cases, tries to keep the relationship going even after the scam is exposed.  I guess true love can’t be stopped, even by borderline abusive behavior and financial fraud.  Now if the scammers are ugly . . . ?

Investment scams are also a big deal, but instead of love, they focus on greed.  A great example of this was Bernie Madoff, whose name alone shows that God has a sense of humor.  Really, you invested with a guy whose name sounds like “made off”?  Guess that explains why you dated Gina Cheatintramp in high school . . . .

But investment scams don’t have to be out and out lies and fraud – they can be more insidious.  Is your broker really working for you, or are they working to maximize their commissions?

I’d write a lot more here, but this post is already nearly at length.  Perhaps this will be a future post.  Or not.  It depends on if I think I can makes something SO BORING as fees and taxes on investment funds humorous.  Dunno.  Maybe if we represent the investment funds with swimsuit models?

Retired:

Fear is the major leverage point of scammers for older folks.  And I’ve seen it in person.  Pop Wilder became (as he grew older) grew correspondingly more fearful.

Why?  My opinion is that older folks have fewer options.  It’s not like they can decide:

“You know what?  Being old and retired sucks.  I’m going to leave it all and become an 89 year old lumberjack in Saskatchewan and start a Canadian rock band called Mötley Canüe and chase 19 year old Canadian girls.”

Pictured:  Canada.  Not Pictured:  Groupies.  I guess the concert would have gone better if we actually had instruments.  Or could sing.

So, Pop Wilder was complaining about expenses – that was his biggest complaint about retirement – his expenses went up and his income didn’t.  I was helping out financially (a little bit) and he explained that his prescription drug costs were astonishingly high.  At the time, the Internet bubble still hadn’t popped, so places like superprescriptions.com (I made this domain name up, so if you go there and are bombarded with advertisements for cheap, dodgy Chinese Viagra®, well, this is a post about getting scammed) were offering his prescription drugs for about 20% of the price as his local pharmacy.  I put together a list – his prescription bill would drop from $700 to about $150 a month.

He wouldn’t do it.  He was more afraid of changing (“what if they don’t talk to the medicine in a soothing voice each night like the local pharmacist does?”) than he was of losing $550 a month.

Imagine an alternate universe where everything is exactly the same, but Canada is spelled Cunudu.  I’d pay to live there.

But older people have another vulnerability:  the world has changed so much that their effective ignorance goes up daily – who can keep up with all of the change in the world?  And it’s started to hit me, too.  When I have a technical issue I just hand my laptop (or whatever gadget) off to The Boy or, increasingly, Pugsley, and they fix it, generally at lightning speed and with competence.  As an example of my reluctance to change technology, my phone is four years old, which might as well be a dinosaur (not a cool one, but one of the lumpy ones that lives in a swamp) compared to the newer phones on the market today.  So, I guess I’ve got a bit of that technophobic bug myself.  I even use my mobile phone for phone calls on occasion, which makes me super rare.

The only time I ever heard Pop Wilder drop the F-bomb was in conjunction with his computer:  “It doesn’t work.  It’s all f***ed up.”  The sheer frustration combined with the unexpected profanity has made this a go-to phrase for The Mrs. and I whenever some complicated thing in our house just refuses to work.

This was a regular occurrence for Pop Wilder.  I think he would (nearly monthly) take the huge, hulking tower (that the local PC people told him was the minimum system he needed to hook up to the Internet) back to their store.  They’d make some minor software changes to the Windows® settings that Pop Wilder had inadvertently messed up, and charge him $150 for dry cleaning his hard drive or lubricating his computer chip.  Every four months they’d change out some larger part for giggles.  After the computer worked again, they’d phone up Pop Wilder and he’d drive thirty miles to go and get it.  They both walked away happy.  Kinda.  Again, a scam, but a completely legal one.

Over all, I think the best advice is still this:  Be honest with yourself.  Be honest with the world.  It’s not a bullet proof way to avoid being cheated, but it’s pretty good.  But someone, somewhere, sometime is still gonna cheat you.  Legally.

I blame the Canadians.  It’s not like they’re really at fault, but they’ll still apologize.

Oh, still not a financial planner or investment dude or anything.  MAKE YOUR DECISIONS AT YOUR OWN RISK.  Really.