Do you love reading cozy mysteries featuring intrepid senior sleuths solving crimes in their retirement community? It seems like the perfect hobby for a retiree, right? You’ve got time on your hands and a lifetime of wisdom—two attributes that make for a great detective. There’s only one problem: no one is being murdered in your building.
It’s a challenge most amateur sleuths face when they’re first getting into crime solving. You probably moved to the retirement community because it was safe and populated with other law-abiding citizens. Now, you’re regretting your decision. But don’t despair! There’s still hope for you, even if you don’t live in a murder capital like Cabot Cove. In fact, there are LOADS of criminals waiting for you to find them. All you have to do is turn on your computer.
Everything happens online these days and that includes crime fighting. Most of the time, these men (and let’s be honest here—the vast majority of these hoodlums are men, even if they’re posing as women or your grandchildren) will appear in your email inbox either trying to scare or entice you. One day they tell you your checking account’s been hacked, the next they promise you millions in crypto if only you follow this link.
Do not respond to these emails. Ever.
If you do, the bad guys have won. You might as well go to the park, leave your purse or wallet on an empty bench, and take a long, leisurely stroll with your walking club.
If you want to do some real detective work, search for cyber criminals online. All you have to do is follow these simple steps.
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Step One: Stake Out Your Suspects
One of the best places to find cyber criminals is on dating sites. These places are terrible for making a love connection but they’re great for finding low life scumbags trying to scam innocent and lonely people out of their money.
According to the FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report, people over sixty lost $389,312,356 to romance scams, and that’s not even counting those who kept their financial losses a secret out of shame. You count those victims and the total is probably close to the annual GDP of Slovenia. By going after these bad actors (many of whom are truly bad actors who have never explored the motivations of the Nigerian prince they’re playing), you are saving others from being swindled by their performance.
Step Two: Disguise Yourself
Good detectives are masters of disguise. Don’t worry if you don’t have a collection of wigs and prosthetic masks in your closet. Online, you can be anyone. Create a profile you think will appeal to the online scammer. This is someone with a lot of disposable income who’s in need of a makeover.
It’s a tricky look to pull off. You have to appear simultaneously affluent and down on your luck. Use either of the Grey Garden sisters for inspiration or if you want to present as male, any late eighteenth-century French nobleman. State your interests as sailing, wine making, and dressage and your pet peeve as the International Monetary Fund and sit back and wait for the sharks to come find you.
Step Three: Line Up Your Suspects
Most mystery writers don’t describe the sometimes tedious nature of detective work. If they did, no one would read their novels. But staking out suspects requires patience. In the real world, you may need to follow someone for weeks, watching them pick up their dry cleaning, do their food shopping, and walk their dog before they stab someone. Same holds for online criminals.
Once your dating profile is set up, you’ll need to engage with both real and fake suitors until you figure out which is which. Have fun with this. Do your best to turn people off by complaining about finding good help on your private island or the price of edible gold flake. The ones who stick around are undoubtedly your swindlers. When they ask you to send them money via a gift card, you’ll know for sure.
Step Four: Catch and Release
In a perfect world, identifying the criminal would lead to immediate arrest, or at the very least, a permanent expulsion from the internet. Unfortunately, the online world doesn’t operate this way. The best you can hope for is to drive your cyber criminal so crazy with your ineptitude that he leaves his life of crime to seek honest work in retail.
Once he’s made his request for a $2,000 gift card, tell him how eager you are to help and then get every one of his instructions wrong. If you need to, trot out the classics like, “Is that a 5 or an S?” or “what’s my password again?” or “I can’t find the Google button.” Play the confused geriatric routine for as long as you can. The longer you keep him occupied the less time he has to scam less savvy people who believe his story about being kidnapped by Somali pirates.
Step Five: Beat Them at Their Own Game
After you get some experience interacting with the criminal element, you can up your game and swindle them out of their own money. If you’ve done your job disguising yourself as a lonely widow with only peacocks for company, your swindler will want to stay in your good graces. If this requires a tiny donation to your peacock resettlement campaign, they might just do it, thinking their investment will pay big dividends later.
Once they’ve sent you a gift card through the dating site (never give them your address or email obviously) cut them loose by killing yourself in a bizarre peacock attack and treat yourself to a nice meal on your scammer’s dime.
This is what my eighty-year-old protagonist does in the cozy mystery Poppy Montgomery Gets Even. Following the advice above, she disguises herself as a lonely widow on the Senior Moments dating site. When the swindlers start courting her, she cons them out of their money.
Things get complicated when she targets a man who may also be a murderer. Now she has to worry about the creeps online and the ones in real life. Lucky for Poppy, she has some tricks up her sleeve that can help her catch a killer before he strikes again.
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