Heads you lose, tails you lose

Recalling a sales pitch from a cell phone service recently.. the pitch started 'based on your outstanding account history we'd like offer you blah blah' but followed with 'how many lines do you have?' ~ my response was 'if you really reviewed my account history you'd know that now wouldn't you?" However, I consider that one of the few times I was able to be clever at the time ...
I still think I'd be able to say "NO" to a sales person if I didn't have the money to buy something I didn't know anything about..... I agree it's definitely wrong to take advantage especially of the elderly but how does a person get to be the age these folks are with the assets they have w/o some intelligence along the way ..... only to have it drained by a handful of phone sales people??

 

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she wasnt necessarily greedy...some people just take the word of really good talkers. My mother-in-law listened to someone tell her over and over to put 100,000 she got (her hubbys death insurance) into stocks.
She finally gave in and called a broker.

Enron crashed and so did her cash.

 

Today with the hundreds of gold buyers running around the country paying a pennies on the dollar it is easy for a person who has bought coins to be ripped off by the buyer even if they did pay a reasonable price to the vendor. If you don’t know what you are doing you will end up being paid a fraction of what your coins are worth. Even rare coins are often price only on their gold melt value by these places like Cash4gold and many of the others who come into your town like the old time carnival hucksters, they will pay as little as they can. To make their profit they are there to pay you the least amount possible for your coins. They rip off those who are just not that informed on what they really own. People really need to go back to their original dealer when they sell and take time and get quotes from numerous dealers. I think in today’s market it is these big coin buying outfits that are the real crooks.

 

I know people say "buyer beware" but it's not that easy for some elderly people. My father is elderly and he doesn't want to be rude to people so he'll agree to whatever they ask if they will just leave him alone. Stop calling or let him hang up. I can't tell you how many times a salesperson would call and my dad would just agree to whatever they were selling and then he'd ask me to please send it back. Finally, I got him a cell phone and he doesn't get those calls anymore.

Many elderly people don't know how to deal with aggressive salespeople like that. It's a shame that this woman didn't have someone close to her who could watch out for stuff like that. Nowadays, my father gives me every mailer/flyer/advertisement he gets and asks me if it's a good deal before he buys. 99% of the time I tell him no.