I’d venture they did. And that should have been clue #1 when he spoke to the first one.

YouTube is replete with videos of about these types of scams. There are large call centers full of ne’er-do-wells trying to gain control over peoples’ computers so they can do the same to them that they did to Mr. Welles. India has a good number of them.

by a couple of smooth operators citing a fine for a failure to appear as a witness summons. They had the local Texas accent. When she talked with a couple of friends who are attorneys they knew of other cases in the area.

And lots of places use offshore tech support. My employers help desk for internal users is initially offshore and at least one of our call centers is as well.

A bigger issue I see is why did he try to call Microsoft for an iPad? But that could be the article making a mistake.

The bank does presumably bear at least some responsibility. There should be some sort of alarms over transferring that much money, especially offshore without some more affirmative confirmation on the account owner's part. I'm assuming he didn't okay anything there. But if they are required to notify the government of somewhere less than $10,000 account withdrawals, seems like they should do the same for their customer. And presuming they sent the money to some offshore bank with sketchy rules on knowing their clients, that also seems like a responsibility of the victim's bank.

Perplexed me, too. I suppose he could have been trying to load Outlook and was having problems.

Nonetheless, he sounded ripe for scammers.

My elderly dad is frequently commenting about speaking with people with accents who call him over all sorts of things. I cannot get him to understand not to accept calls from numbers he doesn’t recognize. For whatever reason, if his phone rings, he feels compelled to answer it and then talk to whoever it is on the other line.

and confusion. He just thought of some tech company . He was a lawyer and I think they would be less likely to fall for these scans.

I have been around even younger people with mental decline issues and I can see how they can result be taken advantage of.