By the time I was 10 my family had been involved with multiple shysters and scam artists. Someone always came by to sell my family on the latest version of snake oil.
I became a skeptic at that young age. The flavor of that year was a scam artist selling my relatives silver at inflated prices, overpriced cookware and vitamins with his own labels attached. At that age I had no idea the silver was overpriced but a relative commented to me on the high price of the vitamins. The man would hold these meetings hosted by my family and everyone would sit around soaking in his engaging stories and sales hype. The man was clever, I'll give him that but I sensed his weakness. He couldn't stand being challenged so I began commenting on some of his illogical statements. Just a kid making comments shouldn't have set him off but it did. He got kind of hateful toward my interruptions but I noticed none of the adults reprimanded me for speaking up. Maybe they were starting to open their eyes?
A couple months later we got word that the man had been arrested for bilking other people out of their money. Something about currency fraud as he oversold his silver ingots and coins. I laughed and told my grandparents, "told you so!"
Thankfully this scam artist only wanted to scam my relatives out of money and wasn't having them do anything dangerous.
It's painful to have naive parents when you are smart.
I wouldn't say I was smart, just made it a point to not be naive and gullible. I think I started on that path around 5 years when Grandma took me to town one Christmas to sit on Santa's lap.
When told what we would be doing that day I was all excited about going to the pop. 3000 town of Fullerton Nebraska. We went to the high school gymnasium which was set up with hay bales ribbons and other stuff to make it seem festive. A huge line of kids so I got in line and waited my turn.
When I sat on Santa's lap I noticed right off he had a fake beard and fake moustache. I don't even remember saying much at all, just tried to carry on as if I believed so maybe I could get something out of this deal?
I got off his lap and was given a bag of roasted peanuts, some broken bits of peanut brittle, a candied popcorn ball and an orange. So, I got something out of it but was feeling creeped out that adults would pull this fake stuff on me. In my mind, everyone telling us this was Santa was somehow guilty and suspect.
Over the next ten years I became very aware of adults lying or just hiding the truth, or giving false excuses for not being fair.
What really hurt was watching family finances being given away to charity or watching my Grandparents who raised me constantly being taken in by one scam after another.
This went on up until their deaths around 2006. 1983 was year they dumped $50,000.00 of our small business profits into a scam telecommunications company. Also the year they refused to give me a bonus on record profits I had helped bring in. 1990 Grandma decided to recoup their losses on that old silver deal by cashing in their ingots. She dropped off the ingots to be appraised and returned the following morning to find the shop had been cleaned out. No receipt, no name of the proprietor and no forwarding address. She was so ashamed she wouldn't go to the police. She did however keep secret that she had saved back a couple boxes of ingots.
2005 she had a heroin addict help her move them from the garage to her bedroom. He came back later, took the ingots and had his friend rip the safe from the floor. Ingots were stored on the floor while earlier she had left the key to the safe in a dresser drawer. Her heroin addict made off with cash from the safe so I advised her to put in a combination number and keep the key on her person. That's when the heroin addict had his dealer return to break in and rip the safe out of the floor. At that point I kind of gave up. I told her she really shouldn't be having money anywhere but in a bank account and then cut up any debit cards.
This is sad. I've never met such gullible people.
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