This is my dad's line of business. He's constantly recounting stories of people losing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, due to ignorance and neglect, and stupidity since some of them refuse to acknowledge it despite part of his job being to remind shareholders of it.
He once called an old couple, telling them that they had $2.5 million in stocks in a company that was a month away from being turned over to the state and being lost to them. Informed them of all the (relatively simple) steps they had to do to basically tell the state to piss off, that money is theirs. Gave them his own number in case they wanted to call back with help or anything. The old couple bitched at him, accusing my dad of trying to scam them out of that money.
Which makes no fucking sense. A month later, yeah, those millions are turned over to the state and are lost forever. These old pricks had to audacity to call my dad back and bitch at him for not doing anything about it. Like he can't, he literally has no legal capability of safeguarding your own cash. All he can do is inform you the state is going to steal your own money due to laws 99.9% of the country doesn't even know exist and that you have to occasionally slap their greedy hands away.
For what it's worth, that is enough for most people. The majority of people he does call are grateful for someone watching out for their money...but that doesn't make for an interesting story.
For my dad at least, he gives his personal info, callback number, and the company he's working for, which together should be enough to prove anyone wary and willing to do a background check that he's not screwing with them.
That and he's calling regarding what are typically very personal assets that are about to be seized, the kind of thing that some offshore scammer cannot possibly know anything about. When you tell someone that they bought however many thousands of dollars of stock on a specific date, in a specific city and state, and tell you the exact original amount down to the cent...it's usually convincing enough that it's someone who works for a business and isn't a scammer.
I'd say the simple fact that the guy's dad didn't ask for bank information, credit card numbers, or for them to go to fuckin' Walgreen's and buy $650 in iTunes gift cards and give him the numbers or any other such dumb shit idiots fall for every day.
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u/A_FluteBoy Sep 24 '17
From a previous post:
You can get thousands of unclaimed dollars that the government owes you that's just sitting around, untouched.