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Opinion
Kansas man happy he still has a filing cabinet
Friday, June 15, 2018
You’ve probably seen the meme floating around your social media feed:
“Five things nobody keeps in their house anymore”
The list: DVDs, CDs, file cabinets, wall calendars and take-out menus.
Probably true for a lot of us, in the days of smartphones, iPads and streaming media.
But you might want to re-think at least one of those items.
Fred Haines of Kansas is glad he still has a filing cabinet. Make that $110,000 worth of glad.
Thanks to his obsessive record-keeping, he has done something seemingly impossible: got his money back from a Nigerian prince scam.
Not actually from the nonexistent prince, but from Western Union, which reached a settlement after finding some of its employees assisted with the scam.
Back in the online innocence days of 2005, Haines was contacted via his Yahoo! account with the promise that he was going to inherit $64 million.
He figured it was a joke or a scam – correct — but went along with it out of curiosity.
“Those Nigerians know how to talk,” he said.
Over the next three years, before he knew it, Haines had remortgaged his home three times, in return for a reassuring fake email from then-FBI Director Robert Mueller and an authentic photo of the Nigerian president, available to anyone with an internet connection.
When no Nigerian man with suitcases full of cash showed up at the Wichita airport, Haines finally realized he had been duped.
Fortunately for Haines, he kept every receipt and piece of correspondence involved in the scam.
Unfortunately, the Nigerian scammers still have Haines’s money, but he and thousands of others could file claims to receive their part of a $586 million fund Western Union set aside in a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.
But that’s not the end of it.
The FTC is warning that people are receiving scam emails telling them how to apply for refunds from the settlement. Sorry, but the deadline to apply was May 31, 2018.
It’s been said thousands of times and ignored thousands more, but the old saying is true: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.