Mountain of scam letters a heartbroken son found in home of mum who lost £100k
WHILE the fraudsters reap millions, their elderly victims are overwhelmed by scam mail and left penniless. Here, KATHERINE FAULKNER and LUCY OSBORNE tell the stories of just some of those tricked into handing over thousands of pounds:
Widow told she must hand over cash to combat ‘evil forces’
FOR the final years of her life, Vicki Westwood was tormented by conmen.
But her family had no idea until she died, when her son Russell Eaton found that every drawer and cupboard in his mother’s house was stuffed with scam mail. Piles of letters from so-called clairvoyants warned that she was under threat from people with ‘evil intentions’.
One told the 81-year- old widow there were ‘misty dark shadows hanging over you’.
The letters asked for money and told her not to speak about them with family or friends.
When Mr Eaton then searched through his mother’s bedroom at her home in Stourbridge, West Midlands, he found notes under her pillow detailing chants she had written under the clairvoyants’ strict instructions.
One was a plea to be protected from the ‘evil’ that others wanted to do to her.
In a letter written to the clairvoyants before her death – but never sent – she said: ‘I really do wish I could get rid of all this bad luck that I seem to be dogged with. To have happiness and laughter back in my life once again would be wonderful. But I lost all that when I lost my dear husband.’
Mrs Westwood died in January last year of septic shock, having suffered cancer. Her family, who saw her every week, had no idea anything was wrong. After her death they found she had sent the scammers nearly £100,000 in the final years of her life. She died penniless.
Mr Eaton said: ‘It was awful to see, just so upsetting. She had been completely brainwashed and we had no idea.
‘These people were still ringing up after she died. They said they knew her and had important messages for her.’
Mrs Westwood had lived on a healthy income from a trust fund set up by her late husband to care for her – providing her with about £2,000 a month. ‘She was of a generation where if a letter is addressed to her, then you send a reply,’ said Mr Eaton, whose garage is now full of the letters.
‘All this stuff, it looks personal, it looks genuine. They have got her name, her address, her date of birth. They were grooming her. To an older, trusting person, you can see how it would seem real. It is just a vile way to take advantage of an older person.’
Taken in – because she thought they were the ‘Queen’s letters’
WIDOW Jessica Looke was bombarded with 30 junk mail letters a day demanding money.
They claimed she had won prizes, or was at risk from evil spirits.
Her family warned her that they were scams, but the letters persuaded Mrs Looke that her loved-ones were simply jealous of her imminent wealth. Mrs Looke, who lived in Chaddesden in Derby, would sit up until 3am trying to keep up with the scammers’ demands.
She would hoard the letters all over her house – in cupboards, drawers and wardrobes.
The criminals would also phone her – sometimes late at night – making demands for money. By the time of her death in 2007, at the age of 83, she had lost more than £50,000. Royal Mail had delivered 30,000 criminal letters to her in the last five years of her life.
Mrs Looke’s daughter Marilyn Baldwin said her mother had been obsessed with winning the financial prizes the letters promised.
‘She wanted to help people she loved and donate money to charities,’ said Mrs Baldwin. ‘Because she believed it, she had promised money to people and felt she couldn’t let them down.’
Mrs Baldwin said Royal Mail stamps on the letters convinced her mother they were real.
‘She used to say, “They are the Queen’s letters”. She couldn’t believe letters with her name and address and the Royal Mail stamp were not real.’ Mrs Looke spent so much on scams that she stopped paying her domestic bills.
She was also putting her life at risk because she was getting her prescription tablets for high blood pressure mixed up with worthless herbal remedies that had been sent to her by the scammers.
She started having panic attacks and palpitations, while concealing the extent of her money problems from her family.
When Mrs Looke stopped paying one clairvoyant, he told her an evil force was trying to harm her and warned she needed to pay him for protection. ‘She became obsessed that this evil was upstairs in her house,’ said Mrs Baldwin. ‘ She became breathless and fearful every time she tried to climb up the stairs.
‘Her body and mind were at breaking point with the continual torment that the scammers had inflicted on her.’ Mrs Looke died of pneumonia. Her daughter is con- vinced the way that she was hounded contributed to her death. Mrs Baldwin started the anti-scam charity Think Jessica in her mother’s memory.
Hid £30,000 loss from her family
FORMER businesswoman Jean Oates was conned out of £30,000 of her life savings. Now she has told how she was ‘sucked in’ by postal scams in the hope of helping others to avoid the same mistakes.
The 79-year- old, who says that she was ‘ terribly embarrassed’, said: ‘I started getting the letters when I was at my most vulnerable when my husband got very poorly. It was after he passed away 18 months ago that I began replying to the letters that said I had won money.
‘I thought it could help get me out of the dark place I was in.’
The grandmother-of-ten – who ran a pub with her late husband, Leonard, before they retired – said that the more money she sent, the harder it was to accept that it had all been a con.
She said: ‘When I didn’t get the money, I kept thinking the next one would be the winner and it all snowballed. I couldn’t stop.’
Mrs Oates, of Driffield, East Riding, kept her problem secret from her five children for several months by hiding the letters in cupboards. Eventually she told her daughter Susan, who got her mother’s post redirected and also changed her bank details.
Told she could speak to her dead husband
FOLLOWINg the death of her husband, clairvoyant scammers began to target Betty Fox.
The 70-year-old and her husband John were together for 40 years and had been inseparable.
After his death, she began receiving letters from criminals running
clairvoyant scams. The letters told her they could speak to her late husband on her behalf.
Desperate to believe it, she began sending the fraudsters cheques to pay for ‘readings’.
‘I tried everything to stop them and begged my mum to stop it,’ her daughter Dawn Jones said.
‘But she would not listen. She was so vulnerable. I said, they are not your friends, it is some seedy man in an office somewhere.
‘But she wouldn’t have it – she wanted to believe it. She was clinging to his memory, there was so much grief.
‘It is just horrible that they could do that to somebody.’
Mrs Fox, from St Helens, Merseyside, also received about ten phone calls a week from people claiming to be clairvoyants.
They told her she was going to win a huge prize that would mean financial security for her entire family – and just needed to keep sending cheques for the secret of how to receive it. In total, Mrs Fox handed over about £10,000 to fraudsters before her death in 2004.
‘I would cry on her shoulder begging her not to send the money,’ Mrs Jones said.
‘But she would say, “I’m doing it for you, and your brother and sister. I’m going to get all this money and share it between the three of you”.’
Former soldier preyed on after he got dementia
HE is in the advanced stages of dementia, but Samuel Rae is still receiving letters trying to scam him out of what is left of his life savings.
The 88-year-old’s desperate son has written to the firms involved begging them to stop, but to no avail.
Mr Rae – a former Army engineer – became isolated after the death of his wife Elizabeth in 2009. The scammers started to prey on him soon afterwards, writing letters claiming he had won a huge cash prize and all he had to do was order from their catalogues.
He was soon spending £100 or more a day on the scams – sometimes making three orders a day from one company.
His son Chris, an accountant and systems analysis, found the scale of what was happening when he moved back in with his father while searching for a new house in 2011.
His father’s home in the pretty village of St Buryan, Cornwall, was filled with scam letters and boxes of goods he had bought from postal fraud criminals.
In 2009, his father had a good weekly pension, and £2,000 in the bank. But by May 2012, he was £20,000 in debt – having spent about £35,000 on scams.
‘There has been a concerted effort by a group of people to steal his money,’ his son said. ‘These people know what they are doing is wrong. They must just not care.’