Suicide After a Scam: One Family’s Story
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 980 Ratings
🗓️ 25 October 2024
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dennis, an 82-year-old proud father and grandfather, makes a connection with a woman he meets on Facebook named Jessie. Jessie claims to have made a lot of money through crypto investments and offers to teach Dennis how she did it. Having developed a trusting relationship with Jessie and hoping to build an inheritance for his family, Dennis decides to invest his savings. When it is revealed that the investments are a scam and Jessie is a fraud, a devastated Dennis takes his own life. Now his son and daughter share his story in hopes of reaching just one person who might be going through a similar situation.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on The Perfect Game. |
| 0:05.0 | He was very excited about this person that he had met online. |
| 0:09.0 | I would say that when we, a turning point for me was when we get together every summer, I live in Minnesota, but we would get all the grandkids and kids and dad together. |
| 0:22.0 | So last summer we were all together at a lake house with with everyone and |
| 0:27.4 | he was talking about this big investment, big opportunity that he was just on the brink of |
| 0:37.8 | figuring out and very excited about the possibility of leaving an inheritance. Welcome back to the perfect scam. I'm your host Bob Sullivan. |
| 0:57.0 | A warning to listeners. Today's episode includes extensive discussion of suicide. |
| 1:02.0 | So we want to say up front, if you or someone you love is in crisis, |
| 1:07.0 | immediate help is available. |
| 1:09.0 | Call or text 988, and professionals are ready to listen and offer an empathetic ear for free. |
| 1:17.0 | Scams are becoming more serious, more costly, more common, more dangerous, more |
| 1:25.0 | more serious, more costly, more common, more dangerous, and with more tragic consequences. |
| 1:28.0 | I've been writing about and talking about tech-based crimes for 30 years, and I've never been as worried about them as I am now. |
| 1:37.0 | If you've listened to the perfect scam before, |
| 1:39.0 | you know organized crime is now behind many of these crimes, and the scale of them has dramatically increased. |
| 1:46.4 | It seems like we all know someone directly involved in a romance scam or gift card scam or a crypto |
| 1:52.2 | scam. |
| 1:53.0 | And that's where we begin our story today, |
| 1:56.0 | with a son and a daughter, |
| 1:58.0 | remembering their dad, |
| 2:00.0 | long before he got romantically involved |
| 2:02.0 | with someone online who said she had an opportunity for him. |
... |
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