Mrs. Buce reports that her excer-swim classs this morning was all agog about "Granny Fraud," as in "hello Granny, please send $10,000 and please don't tell Mom and Dad"--the call coming, of course, not from the child, but from some rapacious lizard in a sunlit piazza halfway round the world. The consensus seems to be that it's goin' round: everybody in the pool seemed to know somebody who (or whose sister, or cousin, or girl-the-nephew-is-engaged-to's brother) has fallen victim to this crude and venerable scam.* The unanimous consensus: it's Facebook.
Is there a rash of Granny fraud? Possibly. I get 71 Google hits, which I guess is not quite zero in Google numbers, but it is pretty close to vanishingly small. And not all of them are on point; at least one seemed to address granny defrauding Medicare, and at least one, the fraud of (alleged) President Steve Dunham Barack Obama's granny in concealing the (alleged?) President's true parentage.** Of course not every report will use the snappy monicker.
But if there is an epidemic of granny fraud, is the internet, and particularly Facebook, to blame? Possibly, but how? I have 100-odd Facebook friends; I can't think of any whose profile says "here is the name of my Granny, and here is her phone number." What, exactly, does Facebook offer a troller not offered by conventional sources? I think the range of possibilities includes these:
1) There's an epidemic of granny fraud.
2) It is caused by Facebook.
3) There's an epidemic of people who see an event they don't like and blame it on a technology they don't understand.
4) 1) and 2)
5) 1) and 3)
6) Other
I guess 3) can stand alone, but not 2). Are there other possibilities?
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*Actually, Mr. and Mrs. Buce do know a recent victim: we could give you particulars if we were so disposed, which we are not.
**Sarcasm. But at the risk of getting sidetracked, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he did pass as "Steve Dunham" in some company, and some point in his life. This fact does not, in my mind, rise to the dignity of a Constitutional infirmity.
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More or less on-topic, I noticed that two of the alleged donors to John Edwards' 'issue' were quite elderly. Which reminded me of a family acquaintance (long deceased). At his wake, his son said the father had been picked clean in his declining years by political fund-raising phone calls. (Republicans, in that case.)
It may be more common than you think.
Years ago when my step mom needed full time care, the wife and I spent an afternoon going through her stuffed mailbox and writing deceased on all the return envelopes from the fraudsters. I especially enjoyed the mail from the rethuglican party. All envelopes were re stuffed to the max to increase the mailing costs.
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