Over the last couple of years, here in Germany, we've had this ongoing fraud episode. I refer to it as the 'fake-police-calling'.
A call will occur to an older guy or gal, usually over seventy years old. They will be told by the fake cop on the other end that their money is unsafe, and that someone will attempt to steal it. So the cops are sending a guy over to handle their money and protect it at the local police station.
A variation of the game is 'junior' calling (a nephew) and he's in trouble...requiring 10,000 Euro to get out of jail.
Some older folks fall for it.....some don't.
Yesterday, we had an episode in Glashutten (a small town in Hessen) where a ninety-year-old German guy had such a call, and handed his money over to the fake police who came.
Somewhere in the next hour or two, it finally came to him.....that this was a bogus situation. He then calls 1-1-0 (the police emergency number). He's on the line with them for a number of minutes. They dispatch REAL cops to come out to his house. Minutes pass.
The old guy now sees a police vehicle come up toward the house, and pulls out his rifle (yes, he is a licensed owner of firearms) and fires at least one round.....maybe more.
Luckily, he doesn't hit nothing, but scares the crap out of the incoming REAL cops.
Because shots were fired.....the cops have to cordon off the area and perform analysis over what happened. Man-hours are wasted but they are required to figure out all of the events that occurred.
As for this 'game' of the callers? It's now one of those top three-hundred problems confronting German society. Cops and banks spent a fair amount of time briefing senior citizens about the fraud,, but you can open any German newspaper and see the reports occur almost daily.
The potential problem in this case is that the old guy could have actually killed a real cop by accident.
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