Letter from the editor

No one is safe from wily scam artists

The story on the front of today's Eagle has been in the works for some time. Around Thanksgiving a Bigfork resident came in and wanted to talk to the paper about how scammers had somehow extorted money from her otherwise thrifty husband. She was embarrassed and didn't want her name in the paper, but figured she couldn't be alone.

Well she's not. Despite the fact that because people are sometimes ashamed of having been fooled so they opt not to report these activities, more than 1,000 people have called the Montana Department of Justice to report being solicited by a scam.

On Monday, I received a double dose of just how many people can be defrauded by these criminals. First, I awoke to discover an e-mail from my own banking institution informing me that there were suspicious charges on my credit card and it had been shut down.

Suspicious indeed. While I made turns on Big Mountain Sunday afternoon, a crook bought some music on iTunes and some Australian jade jewelry. How they managed to do it, I don't know. The card was in my coat pocket likely suffering from frostbite along with my nose.

Secondly, as I was literally typing out the story in my office, I received a phone call from Brian Anderson of Bigfork. Anderson's mother had been called by a character carrying out the "Granny Scam," where some Canadian lowlife appeals to grandma's better angels to bail her hapless "grandson" out of jail following a car accident.

It is sickening, but also sobering.

In the story it is said repeatedly that scammers often prey on the elderly. That emphasis was made by the people I spoke with in part because of Bigfork's older-than-average demographic and partly because of that group's historical track record of falling for it.

But I stand as proof that the Better Business Bureau spokesman was right on when she said that people in the 20-29 age bracket are increasingly the most victimized by ID theft. It doesn't matter how technologically savvy we may think we are. It turns out, the thieves are usually at least one step ahead.

—Alex Strickland