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The original was posted on /r/scams by /u/kendoka15 on 2025-06-13 16:47:49+00:00.

Earlier this week, despite my best efforts for years to inoculate her from scams by telling her about how scams work and what not to do, my mom got a call from scammers pretending to be her bank’s fraud department. They got access to her online account and personal information. Immediately after the call, the real fraud department called her and told her to hang up and helped her change her password and cancel her credit card.

If only it ended there.

A day or two later, she gets an email from Fairstone, a company Bestbuy uses for financing. It says that she just got charged $3000. She calls them, says she got scammed and asks to cancel the account and reverse the charge and they agree to do that.

Today, three days later, she gets an email saying she got charged another few thousand two days ago (after Fairstone said they’d close her account and mark it as fraudulent). She calls Fairstone again and they say the account is on hold and they vaguely tell her the transaction/loan/whatever did not go through.

During this whole ordeal, she didn’t want to tell my dad because she knew he’d freak out and make her feel stupid, even more than she already did. Shame is a big part of getting scammed. She also knew he’d never let her forget it. Unfortunately she’s a bad liar and doesn’t plan things out so when she called her bank to ask a few questions while he was out, he came back and heard her. His reaction was exactly as she feared. He threw a lot of “I wouldn’t have fallen for this” at her.

What really sucks is that had she felt safe to talk to him about it, she wouldn’t have had to deal with this alone and with the added fear of him finding out (she told me a few days ago).

Don’t shame people for getting scammed. It happens to a lot of people and they tend not to seek help if they think they’ll be shamed for it.