Woman Threatened With Lien On Home For 1c Bill

Is the water company THAT desperate?

A 74-year-old blind woman was shocked when her daughter found a letter from the city saying a lien would be placed on her home unless she paid an overdue water bill.

The amount? 1 cent.

Eileen Wilbur told The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro the letter sent her blood pressure soaring, and pointed out that stamps cost 42 cents.

City Collector Debora Marcoccio said the letter was among 2,000 sent out. A computer automatically prints letters for accounts with an overdue balance, and they are not reviewed by staff before being mailed, she said.

The letter warned of a lien and a $48 penalty if the overdue bill is not paid by Dec. 10. The charge was from the previous fiscal year, which ran from July 2007 to July 2008.

"My question is, how come it wasn't paid when the (original) bills went out?" Marcoccio said.

Wilbur's daughter, Rose Brederson, who discovered the bill in her mother's mail, called the situation "ridiculous." But she said her mother, who has lived in the home since 1959, would likely end up paying the penny.

It's pointed out that the stamp to send the bill cost 42 times more then the bill itself. So I'll skip that but of irony. A lien on a house over 1c? Have they considered the cost of filing the lien? Of course not, they'll just add that to her bill.

Woman Sends 400,000 to Nigerian Scammers

Ahhh, here we have a nomination for the definition of "stupid"

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SWEET HOME, Ore. – Janella Spears doesn’t think she’s a sucker or an easy mark.

Besides her work as a registered nurse, Spears – no relation to the well-known pop star – also teaches CPR and is a reverend who has married many couples. She also communicates with lightning-fast sign language with her hearing-impaired husband.

So how did this otherwise lucid, intelligent woman end up sending nearly half a million dollars to a bunch of con artists running what has to be one of the best-known Internet scams in the world?

Spears fell victim to the "Nigerian scam," which is familiar to almost anyone who has ever had an e-mail account.

The e-mail pitch is familiar to most people by now: a long-lost relative or desperate government official in a war-torn country needs to shuffle some funds around, say $10 million or $20 million, and if you could just help them out for a bit, you get to keep 10 (or 20 or 30) percent for your trouble.

All you need to do is send X-amount of dollars to pay some fees and all that cash will suddenly land in your checking account, putting you on Easy Street. By the way, please send the funds though an untraceable wire service.

By this time, not many people will fall for such an outrageous pitch, and the scam is very well-known. But it persists, and for a reason: every now and then, it works.

For Spears, it started, as it almost always does, with an e-mail. It promised $20 million and in this case, the money was supposedly left behind by her grandfather (J.B. Spears), with whom the family had lost contact over the years.

"So that's what got me to believe it," she said.

Spears didn't know how the sender knew J.B. Spears' name and her relation to him, but her curiosity was piqued.

It turned out to be a lot of money up front, but it started with just $100.

The scammers ran Spears through the whole program. They said President Bush and FBI Director "Robert Muller" (their spelling) were in on the deal and needed her help.

They sent official-looking documents and certificates from the Bank of Nigeria and even from the United Nations. Her payment was "guaranteed."

Then the amount she would get jumped up to $26.6 million – if she would just send $8,300. Spears sent the money.

More promises and teases of multi-millions followed, with each one dependent on her sending yet more money. Most of the missives were rife with misspellings.

When Spears began to doubt the scam, she got letters from the President of Nigeria, FBI Director Mueller, and President Bush. Terrorists could get the money if she did not help, Bush’s letter said. Spears continued to send funds. All the letters were fake, of course.

She wiped out her husband’s retirement account, mortgaged the house and took a lien out on the family car. Both were already paid for.

For more than two years, Spears sent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone she knew, including law enforcement officials, her family and bank officials, told her to stop, that it was all a scam. She persisted.

Spears said she kept sending money because the scammers kept telling her that the next payment would be the last one, that the big money was inbound. Spears said she became obsessed with getting paid.

An undercover investigator who worked on the case said greed helped blind Spears to the reality of the situation, which he called the worst example of the scam he’s ever seen.

He also said he has seen people become obsessed with the scam before. They are so desperate to recoup their losses with the big payout, they descend into a vicious cycle of sending money in hopes the false promises will turn out to be real.

Now, Spears has gone public with her story as a warning to others not to fall victim.

She hopes her story will warn others to listen to reason and avoid going down the dark tunnel of obsession that ended up costing her so much.

Spears said it would take her at least three to four years to dig out of the debt she ran up in pursuit of the non-existent pot of Nigerian gold.

By Anna Song KATU.com

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I saw this on FoxNews.com and followed the link to KATU.com. There's a comment section, and I couldn't help replying. I'll just copy the majority of it and tweak it a bit.

She's an IDIOT! It's bad enough she blew her own money this way, how dare she take her husbands money. If he let her have access to it, then he deserves to be broke too. If not, then any sane man would divorce her and press charges. Wedding vows have something about not driving your spouse into the gutter from greed, I'm sure. She deserves to be divorced and cut off from family. She spent THEIR MONEY. She stole from them, lied to them, and drove them into debt. That shows she just didn't care about her family one bit. She didn't care enough to give that $400,000 to FAMILY. She didn't use that money for her families health, well being, education, enjoyment, happiness. She didn't give a flying fruitcake about her family, only herself. Don't divorce her or cut her off because she's stupid. Divorce her and cut her off because she's greedy and didn't think once about her family and the people she was dragging down with her. She didn't care about her family and she didn't give a blankity blank about how she was hurting them and destroying them.

Read this story again and replace "Scam" with "drugs" and see if you're sorry for her. Had she spent $400,000 on drugs, no one would be crying for her or saying poor her. Had she taken her husbands retirement and mortgaged the house to buy drugs there would be no "poor baby". Why hasn't the bank called the loan, foreclosed her house and taken her car after finding out what she used the money on? She used their money to perpetuate a fraud. They warned her, she did it anyways. Obviously she can't handle money properly. Why doesn't she have a conservator managing her money at this point?

Why didn't her family remove her from the finances immediately after the first time she sent money? Remove her name from all documents and authorizations, place her on an allowance? Why didn't they hire a lawyer and declared her incompetent after the second time? Why didn't the husband put her on the street or in a facility after the third? You can't help someone who doesn't want it. If a raft full of people sank, would you keep trying to pull out the one drunk person who poked a hole in the bottom and who keeps pushing you away instead of saving the other 20 first and coming back to that one? Go save the innocent victims first, then try to save the idiot whose own stupidity caused the whole problem to begin with, and who is refusing help. We should "poor baby" her family that she screwed over, not her.

She is NO VICTIM here. She is a person who willingly sent money for an illegal purpose. If she still has a job, I'd be seriously questioning her supervisors. Why keep someone this naive, gullible, irresponsible employed as in charge of peoples health and safety?

Would I feel this way if it were my family and friends... YES! If they fall for something this obvious to the tune of 400,000 (or even 5,000), they deserve it. If a relative was 400,000 in debt and broke because they sent 400,000 (or 5,000) to one of these over and over and over, and asked me for grocery money, I would say NO. I'd take them some canned food, maybe some noodles, cereal, milk, bread, eggs. But no way I'd give them 2 coins to rub together. If they were about to lose their house because they sent all that money, I'd say too bad. I'd buy them a 500- run down travel trailer and say "There ya go, good luck". Helping people be stupid does not help them. Some people have to be eating spam in a cardboard box before they get the point.

As for the argument "Oh, she isnt stupid she just didn't know." She DID KNOW. Family told her. Police told her. Banks told her. SHE KNEW. She didn't CARE.

Too bad the teller who did these wire transfers for her, knowing it was a scam and she's a moron, didn't "accidentally" wire it to a reputable charity instead. It would be out of the hands of an idiot and doing good. I'd say accidentally wire it to a relative, but look how much sense the relatives had. So yeah, let's go with charity.

I, like others, think SHE may be the scammer. She well may have siphoned all that money into an off shore account of her own. Her husband better keep one eye open at all times. She may well have liquidated all the couple's assets under the ruse of sending it to a "scammer" while squirreling it away in an off shore account of her own, preparing for a quick plane ride to the wealthy, tax-free, single life. There's nothing in the article saying there's proof she doesn't have that money stashed. Even if she doesn't, she didn't lose it, she gave it away to strangers and drove her FAMILY into crushing debt to do so.

This scam takes a micron of common sense and 10 minutes of research and questioning.

"Wow, if you have $25 million why not deduct your fee from that..."

"Lets see, I think I'll google FBI to get the official website, call or email and ask them to check the "file" on this situation and confirm it to me".

"Hmmmm, before sending $400,000 to a stranger maybe I'll go to the police station and have them investigate it to confirm" (Wait, the police DID tell her it was fake... hmmmmm)

"I know, I'll take a cashiers cheque to the nearest FBI field office and hand it over to an agent, get his personal info, and a receipt" (I bet she insists on a receipt when she's pays her phone bill)

"Hmmmm, I'll have the bank check into this first...) (Oh wait, they told her it was a scam too!)

I have ZERO sympathy. She was warned by family, BANK officials, LAW ENFORCEMENT officials, EXPERTS who she chose to ignore. She ignored PROFESSIONALS. I bet she rips into people who change their own IVs instead of allowing the PROFESSIONAL who knows what she's doing (supposedly), yet she ignores PROFESSIONALS who know what they're doing.

I just read some information from FBI... the stats are 1 in 12.5 MILLION fall for the 419 scams. Only 1 in 12.5 million fall for it.

Ha! And it gets better and better.... she has a website asking for donations via paypal now. She's working her own little scam here, trying to get others to correct her mistakes. Any money sent to her will certainly be sent to the same scammers, as the article even says the police have now had to threaten her to stop her. She'll just be more discreet about sending it now. She's chasing bad money with good and won't stop. She's just convinced this is real. Or, she stashed that money away and is looking to cash in a bit more for good measure before she "disappears"