Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT by Don Polson      Red Bluff Daily News 7/15/2025

        Text fraud; “Gray hairs” everywhere

As a public service, I share a financial fraud recently attempted upon my wife. I awoke from a nap to hear her conversing with a man about how someone was trying to remove money from her Wells Fargo account at a local branch in Bend, Oregon.

She had received a text message to answer “yes” or “no” regarding a purchase of some hundreds of dollars at a retail store. She replied “no,” which brought about this call from an unidentified man who wanted her to go to a local Wells Fargo where an agent with the FBI would arrest the individual trying to steal her account balance.

She was supposed to leave the phone call open so he could instruct her to take her money out of her account herself. I motioned her to follow me into another room where I told her quietly that this was a “con job” pretending to protect her; it didn’t sound “on the level.” An FBI agent was going to meet her? Really!?

I quickly “Googled” “Wells Fargo text fraud” and saw that it was just a way to entice a response to the initial text message to indicate that a person could be a “mark,” or potentially gullible victim. When my wife told the guy on the phone what I found, he insisted he was just doing his job and had a family to support.

He then asked to speak to me; when she said “no” he then burst into a bunch of profanity, giving away that it was, in fact, a con job. Was some other guy going to pretend to be a federal agent and say he needed to confiscate the withdrawn funds to prosecute someone else? I mean, think about it. Here’s hoping this saves someone else from falling for a similar scam.

***

Going to an RV park in the summer is almost like visiting a “seniors only” residential camp. The “gray hairs” are everywhere—including, of course, ourselves. The weekend crowd did bring families and younger generations of campers, who returned to their jobs and lives on Monday.

Before we landed at Netarts Bay Garden RV Park in Oregon, west of Tillamook on the coast, our summer travels started at our favorite spot in the Oregon Cascade mountains by the Willamette Pass between Bend and Eugene, at 5,000-feet elevation. We try to get there early in the summer and then after Labor Day so we can compare the snow coverage on Diamond Peak as it melts.

A wintry mix of weather can befall mountain locales practically any summer month; once, in August, enough hail fell to turn the campground road white. While there this June, a weather system dropped temperatures into the 30s and brought a downpour of slushy frozen rain, even snowflakes. A propane burner got turned to high in the morning to take the chill off.

I got to eat some “humble pie” over a “faux pas” in conversation with a camp neighbor. He was enjoying the experience of going barefoot, as some are wont to do when out in nature. I wondered if he had some Native American blood as he was getting “black feet” from his habit. To my embarrassment, he said he did have Shoshone heritage and was raised on the Wind River reservation in Wyoming.

I meant no disrespect, I told him, and he shared some of his experiences, which were not complementary to the non-native whites at the time. The rather insulting term, “res rats” was often used when referring to the kids when they went to a local store, where the cashier would check out the other customers before those from the reservation. People can be cruel, and I can only hope they learned to be better toward their fellow humans.

***

I shared an experience from years ago when we met a Native American man and his nephew while camping near Yellowstone National Park. He was taking his nephew “under his wing,” so to speak, to expose the young nephew to his trade, furniture making and home remodeling.

Primarily, he wanted to get his nephew “off the reservation” and away from some of the deleterious influences of other young men and boys and their ill-chosen habits and life styles. While visiting Yellowstone, they were following clues in a book by a man that had hidden some sort of treasure among the woods, mountains and rivers of that area. They didn’t find it but someone eventually did, I later read. We wished them success, but mostly success in raising his Native nephew in more productive ways of life.

My camp neighbor agreed that the government-provided subsistence, and the poorly distributed proceeds from Indian casinos, were not serving the Native Americans well, whose fortunes have been poorly impacted as a result.