Re: Travellers ?X!@#&*( UPDATE
Re: Travellers ?X!@#&*( UPDATE
From a Washington Post article.<br /><br />Each spring, in caravans of trucks and trailers that have replaced the ornate covered wagons of yore, the men pull out of Murphy Village. They fan out across the country to ply their trade, as do men from the clans in Texas and Tennessee. They are skilled driveway pavers, barn painters and roofers, often with regular seasonal customers.<br /><br />Sometimes their wives go along, depending on the ages of the kids and whether they're still in school. Sherlock calls it "going on a trip." She has gone out some seasons with her husband, Peter. While her husband worked this past summer, she went to Indiana and Illinois to shop with other Traveler women.<br /><br />But police in several states know some of these Travelers as something other than honest, hardworking folk. Some of them have a reputation, backed by arrests and convictions, for being relentless con artists. Like grifters, they move around the country running home improvement swindles. And the women sometimes run shoplifting scams, police say.<br /><br />Joe Livingston, an investigator with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division who is an expert on Traveler scams, estimates that perhaps 10 to 15 percent of the Murphy Village Travelers are thieves, or "yonks," as the Travelers label the wayward among them.<br /><br />However small the proportion, their impact is felt widely along the seasonal circuits they travel. Livingston calls it "nontraditional organized crime." And tracking the phenomenon is a nightmare, he says, because of the web of same-names and nicknames among the Travelers.<br /><br />Like others who have tangled with the Travelers, Livingston is both intrigued and mystified by their lifestyle.<br /><br />He can quote case after case of Traveler scams. The first he encountered was in 1984, up in Rhea County, Tenn. Some workmen completed a small construction job for an elderly man, who went inside the house to get money to pay them. They saw where he kept the cash, Livingston said, and returned later and stole it.<br /><br />Some of the scams are inventive. Several Travelers were arrested a few years ago over a scam in which a Traveler wore a white lab coat and a stethoscope and went door to door in rural South Carolina, telling old folks he was there to examine them for an increase in their Social Security benefits. During the "exam," other Travelers searched the house for cash.<br /><br />"They basically would go door to door seeking home improvement work, saying, 'Hey, I was working down the street and noticed your chimney needs some work and I'd be willing to do it for this wonderful price,' " says Tom Bartholomy, president of the Better Business Bureau in Charlotte and former president of the BBB of Northeastern Indiana. Unsuspecting homeowners, charmed by the Travelers' seeming earnestness, would agree and let them up on the roof. "Then they'd come down and say, 'Hey, this is going to take more than I thought. I need some more supplies. We're going to need a deposit.' And then they're gone.<br /><br />"I've been with the Better Business Bureau 20 years, and it's happened every year, like clockwork, like the swallows of Capistrano," he said. "When I was in Fort Wayne, they would usually come in RVs and stay at a campground, trailer-park-type area. The men would go around in pickup trucks to the neighborhoods, and the women would go to stores and steal merchandise. They go steal it, and then take it back for cash refunds." Investigator Livingston says, "There's always been speculation that women do things, but we haven't uncovered a big-time network yet."<br />www .rickross.com/reference/irish_travelers/irish_travelers10.html<br /><br />I read an article last fall that stated they had moved into high tech identity theft and computer scams.
<br /><br />They are makeing there rounds all over LI this month scaming old folks 
