Perfect Scams and Me
I don’t want to overwhelm you with the spectacular details of my painfully hip existence, but I recently started binging The Perfect Scam, a weirdly addictive podcast from the good folks at the AARP, an organization formerly known as the American Association of Retired People.
I know what you’re probably thinking; what’s a dynamic young person like yourself doing consuming media created by an organization for old people? As a forty-six year old, you won’t be eligible to join AARP for several years!
What can I say? Like everyone, I am morbidly fascinated by true crime and real-life criminals and The Perfect Scam is unique amongst the true crime podcasts I’ve been listening to in that the people at the center of each story generally do not disappear and/or turn up dead.
In that respect Perfect Scam is mild and gentle for a true crime podcast. It’s a nice podcast for nice people of a certain age. Listening to tale after tale of fraud, manipulation and con artistry I found myself thinking that I’m lucky that I’ve never been the victim of a scam.
Then I realized that I had, in fact, been the victim of a VERY big scam that played havoc with my mind, mental health and finances.
While working on You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, I came to the unfortunate realization that I had so much credit card debt that there was no way I would ever get out of it without serious help.
In desperation I sought help in one of the worst possible places. I signed on with a debt consolidation group that assured me that if I only paid them an enormous amount of money and stopped using all my credit cards they would help me pay off thirty-five thousand dollars in credit card debt in just a few years.
I’ll never forget how honest and dependable the scammer selling me on the program sounded. He really made me feel like he and the evil organization he represented had my best interests at heart and were a force for good in the universe that would help desperate, vulnerable people like me get out of very bad situations.
I should have realized that something was terribly wrong from the very beginning, when they told me I’d have to pay them something in the area of seven hundred dollars a month for what I would eventually learn was nothing.
The debt consolidation group did not help me pay off any of my credit card debts. The vultures’ modus operandi was to bleed the poor and struggling for as much money as possible and then, when it had stolen every last penny, to do what I realized I could do myself for NO MONEY: negotiate with credit card companies so that the destitute and struggling end up paying thirty to fifty percent of what they owe instead of the total amount.
I had paid these monsters probably ten thousand dollars to do nothing but wait for my financial situation to get worse and worse when I realized that I had been had.
Things got so bad that I opened the front door one Saturday morning to someone from the sheriff’s office with paperwork informing me that I was being sued for non-payment by American Express.
For a surreal month or two I would find time to slip away from The A.V Club offices to represent myself in court. I ended up paying American Express off with the final payment from You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me.
My disastrous experience being scammed by evil predators has a happy ending. Several years after I ended my painful relationship with the debt consolidation group I unexpectedly got a check for something in the area of seven thousand dollars.
It was my part of a settlement agreement after the debt consolidation company’s antics were legally deemed not just unethical but criminal.
I was lucky enough to get at least some of the money I wasted back and while I’ve fallen deep into credit card debt a number of times since then I’ve sometimes found a way to wiggle myself out—temporarily, unfortunately—without getting into bed with scammers, but then the whole damn cycle starts all over again.
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