I'm surprised this hasn't happened to me
Everyone is talking about Bruce Hay, the Harvard Law professor who got scammed by two women. They befriended him, manipulated him and scammed him out of not just money, but emotionally.
There’s a lot of twists and turns, but the most baffling, and the thing that blows my mind is that they tricked Hay into renting his house to them, and moving all his furniture out and all of their things in.
But when Hay and the women returned to Cambridge two days later, Hay and Zacks’s beautiful Italianate home on a quiet corner of Mount Vernon Street had been emptied of his family’s furniture, cookware, toys, documents, books, Zacks’s mother’s and grandmother’s heirlooms — and everything replaced with the women’s furniture. When Shuman had gone MIA in Quebec, Hay believes, she wasn’t seeing a doctor. She’d been overseeing the complicated move, all $10,000 of which had been charged to Hay’s credit card.
The next day, Hay called the Cambridge police. When the officer accompanied him to his house, the women came to the door — his door — and furnished a lease renting them the $3.2 million home for two years for $1,500 a month. He says Shuman had used his laptop while they were in Quebec to send an email to her lawyer from his Harvard account, in which he purportedly said the “lease” “looks good.” Then they produced a copy of the $3,000 check they’d made out to Hay before the Quebec trip. See, we paid a security deposit, they said.
It’s easy to point fingers at Hay to say how could he be duped, but I just feel bad. Everyone wants to feel love and cherished. And sometimes people take advantage of that.