[scrubby]

My 85 year old grandfather didn't commit suicide, but he was taken for every penny of his meager life savings by the Jamaican lottery scam. My dad discovered what was going on, called the police, but was told there was nothing they could do. My grandfather firmly believed and probably still does that he had won the lottery and was just waiting for a payout. We basically had to revoke his phone privileges to keep him from giving them more money, because he was so convinced. He does't have Alzheimer's or dementia. The scammers are just very convincing.

[wahsd]

I really think there is some other maybe even unidentified kind of mental issue going on with this kind of scam. I say that because I know of some people who are locked into the Iraqi dinar scam and simply cannot see what is going on in spite of being otherwise ostensibly smart and intelligent people. Maybe it's "greed" , but it seems to me that it's more of a vulnerability due to hopes and dreams not matching topic sophistication.

[simonw]

I think it's a couple of things.

The first is the sunk cost falacity / escalation of commitment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment ) - if you've already given the scammers $500, your choices are either to admit that you've been scammed and will never see that money again. The alternative is to convince yourself that you really are going to get the money (and you haven't been scammed) if you just send them a little bit more...

The second factor is that at a certain age most people begin to lose their judgement. You don't have to have full on dementia, just slightly less good judgement than you had when you were younger, in order to fall for on of these scams.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/25/your-money/as-cognitivity-... - "As Cognition Slips, Financial Skills Are Often the First to Go". Interestingly, financially savvy people who actively manage their money are at a much higher risk of losing everything to bad decisions at an older age.

[JamesBarney]

I don't think it's greed. I think it's hope. Most of the people I know who fall for these scams are not any dumber or greedier than other people I know. They do seem to be much more optimistic and positive though.

Think if this same person has late stage cancer and believed they were gonna make it despite all odds it would be an inspiring lifetime movie. But unfortunately I think these are the same people who also believe that a Nigerian prince needs them to transfer some money before they will be handsomely rewarded against all odds.

[scrubby]

I agree. In my grandfather's case, he was keeping this all a secret because he wanted to surprise his family with financial help from his "windfall." Something I think he always wished he could do, but never had the money to do.

[JBReefer]

Man, that's incredibly heartbreaking.

[granos]

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. - John Steinbeck (disputed)

Lots of otherwise reasonable people are willing to delude themselves for a shot at a windfall.

[Mz]

My mother is in her late 70s and my father died a couple of years ago, I think just short of his 89th birthday. They grew up in a different world, where a handshake meant something and overnight wealthionnaires who won the lottery or got rich doing something online that many older people cannot fathom or whatever was just not a Thing that was going on.

My dad grew up on a farm, in a log cabin with a dirt floor. He remembered those phones I have only ever seen in black and white movies (http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=old+party+line+phone&FOR...). He was able to tell me those phones were a party line, something I had never known. In other words, one phone line serviced the entire town. Anyone with a phone could pick up when it rang and potentially listen in on your call. There was no expectation of privacy.

He just could not keep up with the rate and level of change in his last years. The world had changed too much and he no longer wanted to try to understand. It was just not the world he grew up in.

People also were less likely to be college educated back then. There are ways in which they genuinely lacked the sophistication we just assume people are supposed to have.

My parents were/are very good hearted people and the way the world has changed just does not fit with how they related to it for so much of their lives. This is probably true for a great many other elderly people.

[plonh]

Then "handshake" bit is rose colored view of the past. Scams were incredibly common in the past. Real estate, diamond and gold jewelry, and even the original "snake oil" and patent medicines, and all the classic "confidence man" scams.

[Mz]

I was not saying no one ever got burned. But life was different back then and it can make it hard for an older person to figure out how to judge things today. It is very similar to moving to a different culture. Culture shock is not evidence of incompetence. It just means the context is vastly different from what you are used to, which is throwing sand into your gears. It is kind of disrespectful to assume older people are all just incompetent and stupid and not account for the fact that the world today is dramatically different from the one in which they grew up.