If you can’t beat ’em …
A 92-year-old South Carolina gave relentless scam callers a taste of their own medicine when they wouldn’t give up their constant attempts to fleece her.
The jokester — lovingly called “Bumma” by her family” — casually talks nonsense to the swindlers until they finally give up the charade, a pastime that gives her and her granddaughter a good laugh.
“She loves messing with them and getting a good laugh!” granddaughter Cheyenne Toney told Storyful.
“Bumma is 92 and lives alone with a sound mind and great sense of humor. She gives us plenty of entertainment!”
Toney captured Bumma’s comedic ramblings in a series of videos in March and April, saying her grandma receives “a lot” of spam and scammer calls.
In one video, she asks the cheat whether they believe in God before telling him the shocking reason she doesn’t need the wares he’s selling.
“I think I’m going to get raptured, you know?” Bumma says with a straight face.
“So I don’t need all that stuff. Jesus is coming back soon, and he’s going to take me up in the clouds with him. Are you ready to go?”
That’s when the scammer hung up the phone.
The tactic seemingly works every time — in another video, Bumma asks the caller for a senior discount, prompting the fed-up scammer to accuse her of wasting his time.
“You’re kidding with me right?” he can be heard saying several times before hanging up in a huff.
In the final clip, Bumma feigns hysteria after a scammer tries to convince her that a loved one was arrested and needed bail money after causing a car crash that sent the other driver to the hospital in critical condition.
“What am I going to do, lady?” Bumma says through fake sobs as Toney giggles in the background.
The fraudster tried to convince Bumma to send over whatever money she could — despite her claims she didn’t have enough — or else her loved one would be sent to jail.
That sends Bumma into another fit of sobs, which proved dramatic enough to force the scammer to hang up.
While Bumma is ahead of the curve, elderly people are especially susceptible to scam callers looking to bilk them out of their funds.
In 2022, nearly 70,000 people were collectively conned out of $1.3 billion from romance scams, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
