Rush - Intervention prep help

A guy at arstechnica.com is getting ready to do an intervention with his father, who has fallen hard for a scam. Money, community relations and friends are already lost. Family is in the balance. Right now it seems to be a matter of saving their mother, and keeping his father from homelessness. The man is deep into denial.

The son who is doing the intervention is flying out tomorrow, and just doesn't have a lot of time. Is there any quick advice I can pass on? Right now he needs help with the intervention. I've already pointed him here and to scamwarners.

You can read all about it here http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/for ... 2005686931. Any help would be much appreciated.

The guy says that he has over 1000 emails between his father and the scammers and would be happy to hand them over for some action later. I plan on getting in on it when the time comes, but maybe the real baiters here could deal out a bigger helping of abuse. I think experience is good because these clowns have proven successful, and thus may be a harder target than the average lad.

I posted this over at 419eater, but they recommended this place. Any wisdom that I might pass on in a hurry?

Thanks.

Every scam victim I have dealt with reacts differently so what works for one person may not work for another.

Generally, when a vic is so far invested as it seems in this case there comes a choice for the victim to make;
Believe the scammers and remain a winner and send that one last payment
Believe those around them and become a scam victim who has lost X amount of dollars

For some, they just cant make that second choice.

In cases like this, often they have borrowed from family and friends as well so their support base is dwindling around them, the only ones who seems to understand are the people scamming them, the lottery agency and bankers.

In order to convince them you need to be supportive and certainly not judgemental, you need to understand it from their point of view and support them.

Play along to some extent and rather than trying to prove the victim is wrong, help the victim to prove he is right, of course you will not be able to prove he is right but you need to try

Something along the lines of, i know that I have had my doubts but lets prove you are right, do some searches together with him, the favourite search i use for lottery scams is searching on the winning ticket numbers or batch numbers, you can usually find many other hits and usually all scam related, let him find this with as little input as possible, of course, his winning ticket number could not be the same as the ticket number for the microsoft lottery as well so maybe there is a mistake, search on the email addresses and lottery name, check the real lottery site for winners details and stop at their scam warning for the vic to see, search on phone numbers and if it is a 4470 number you will need to find information showing those numbers as redirect numbers, if there is a website involved let us know about it and we will hopefully be able to get it closed, another thing to sow some more seeds of doubt.

You can also send him lots of other lottery formats that are similiar, surely he cant win again, eventually with any kind of luck you will be able to sow the seeds of doubt to give him the motivation to look for more evidence.

Offer to have him move in with you, at least until the lottery winnings come in and keep him from accessing the internet unless he is suppervised, dont let him lose any more money.

I noticed somebody suggested to have him declared incompetent to keep him from his money, while this may work it will make him feel even more alienated and drive him closer to the people who believe him, the scammers.

of course, if you can get him here we can show him different ways to prove it is a scam and can suggest how the scammers will try to get more money through recovery scams after he has stopped sending money.

Evindence is the key, find as much as possible before approaching him, be ready to tell him what he can search on next.

This will not be easy from what I have read but it has to be done.

Some of our members are equipped to make phone calls and we can also email the victim to try to convince him as well.

Good luck with him, please come back and keep us updated and ask as many questions as you need to.