Beware

Friday, July 29, 2011

It was as if an episode of “Dateline” had found its way into Bedford: a woman going through some monetary issues got a call from a company that said it could help her with her mortgage.

The story was detailed by our Maryalice Gill in last week’s Journal, so suffice it to say that it was a scam and the woman not only didn’t get the help she sought, she apparently got ripped off.

Well ...

To paraphrase Rhett Butler, there is money to be made building up a civilization but also as one is being torn down and while we might not be in that latter stage, times are tough and there are those who would take advantage of people who, for whatever reason, grasp at the straws of hope.

Indeed, on Sunday night’s edition of “Dateline” there was a profile of a Connecticut woman who fell for one of those Nigerian e-mail scams and lost a quarter of a million dollars.

And it’s all because of hope.

When we find ourselves in desperate situations, we long for a helping hand to get us out. Sure, in many cases we could do it ourselves, but sometimes we can’t. If we have no job, it’s unlikely that we can pay the mortgage so when someone offers to help us, well, we’re grabbing that straw and holding on for dear life.

And why not? Surely we can trust our fellow man.

The desire to trust people is strong within us. We hesitate to immediately look askance, even at something that sounds too good to be true and especially during a time of economic difficulty.

But we must, unfortunately. Some people got into an economic mess because they trusted banks and mortgage companies offering them home-buying deals that were too good to be true, but we want to own homes, we want to trust people and, gee whiz, if you can’t trust a bank, what institution can you trust? Enron? Oops.

It’s a sad commentary on life as we live it today, but, as we used to say in the newspaper business:

If your mother tells you something, get a second source.