Maybe you heard recently about a personal finance reporter, Charlotte Cowles, who was the victim of a scam and wrote about it for her employer, The Cut. The headline for the story was dramatic: “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger.”
In this week’s episode of The Perfect Scam, I talk with a college professor who put three gold bars into a shoe box and handed it to a stranger. She was a victim of the same scam, essentially — the price she paid was much higher, however. Not only did Linda Khandro suffer the theft of $400,00 — all her life savings — she had to retire from her job in order to access the retirement money that was stolen. She was left penniless, unemployed, and very traumatized. I don’t in any way mean to minimize Cowles’ tragedy, but at least she’s young enough to recover. Linda Khandro is in her 70s. Her retirement account is now, essentially, empty. She frequents food banks now.
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Linda is a special person. She plays the harp, and has a vocation playing the harp for people in hospice who are on the verge of dying. It’s an incredibly generous-hearted thing to do — she helps usher strangers through that end-of-life doorway. It was clear to me when we spoke that Linda’s big heart had a lot to do with why she was targeted by criminals for a four-month nightmare that has landed her in financial dire straits.
Linda’s story is common. A recent study suggested that honest, kind people are more likely to expect others to be equally honest — and that makes them a popular target for criminals. Meanwhile, a Gallup poll suggests that nearly one in 10 Americans were victims of a scam within the past year. I know it’s easy to hear these stories and think “It could never happen to me.” That’s incorrect. It happened to a personal finance journalist. It happened to a professor. It could indeed happen to you or someone you love; odds are that’s already happened.
I hope you’ll listen to this week’s episode of The Perfect Scam — it includes some lovely harp music, and you’ll get to hear from a very lovely human being. If you aren’t into podcasts, the transcript below gives you a sense of who Linda is, and why this crime is so devastating.
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[00:02:03] Linda Khandro: I stumbled into harps quite by accident; it was not deliberate. But uh that about the late 1970s and it took about another 15 or so years before I played more seriously. And in playing more seriously, I also put myself through a program that helps musicians learn some basic skills for playing for people who are hospice patients, or not even hospice patients, but playing in hospitals. I’ve played for dialysis patients and chemo patients as well as the hospice, you know, end of life situation. I found out that the harp was really an ideal instrument for that setting, especially for somebody who may be close to dying. And it’s just the way the instrument resonates in space in the room. And the sound, especially of the bass strings, has got a long duration, a long time for it to die away so to speak. And that makes it very amenable to people who are in the process of leaving life. They can follow that sound if you like.
[00:03:17] Bob: Yeah, the harp is such a special sound.
[00:03:19] Linda Khandro: It it really is, that’s the thing. It is actually, I’m going to jump out here and uh, put myself on the line. Um, there’s really no other instrument like it.
[00:03:29] Bob: It has a sort of ancient feel to it which I, I suspect also contributes to what you’re saying, but I just want to dwell on it for a minute before, because it’s quite profound that you would spend all this time to be with people who most of the time were strangers, right?
[00:03:43] Linda Khandro: Yeah.
[00:03:44] Bob: … to help them pass with music. I mean what is that, how do you describe that experience to people?
[00:03:49] Linda Khandro: Oh, Bob, that’s some, that’s a long story in itself, but I’ll try to make it short. It changes me. It started to change me almost the first day I walked into somebody’s room for the first time every playing for somebody who was actively dying. And I had this rather bizarre experience. And you’ve got to, I mean I know you understand, I’m a scientist, right. But I kind of pay attention to what I feel, but my feeling on sitting behind the harp and you, you’re playing a harp and you’re, it’s in contact with your body, so a little bit like a cello or a double bass. You know your, your core, your, your skeletal system is in contact with this vibrating wood and strings. And I had this strange sense that the woman who was dying, and I didn’t know she was dying right at that moment but I found out later, she had been talking to her granddaughter until I came in and started to play — she died five minutes later and I didn’t know about it for the next 20 minutes. I was just playing. And when I was told that she was gone, and the granddaughter was there, you know, being comforted by a nurse who had come in, and the granddaughter came up and gave me this massive hug and said, “Granny died 5 minutes after you started playing.” Well I almost started crying at that point, my feeling was the harp was a bridge that had provided a pathway for this woman to leave her life.
[00:05:26] Bob: Those kinds of profound experiences kept happening during the decade or so that Linda played at hospice facilities.
[00:05:35] Linda Khandro: And after that, I started having unusual experiences where I’d go to a hospice location and the caregiver would say to me, “Oh, I’m so sorry you’ve gone all the way here because uh, Mabel, my mother’s name, just died um, 10 minutes ago and you don’t need to be here.” I said, “Oh I do. I do need to be here. Not for me, but for Mabel and the others around.” And so I played for my half an hour and then I went home. And that happened again. So I can’t look at those experiences and just dismiss them. But as a scientist, you know I’m, I’m on, I’m on a fence a little bit. But I don’t need to be on that fence, I just need and want to experience what it’s like to help somebody at that point in their life. If I’m in a hospital or a more public environment, the sound of the harp would go 20, 30 feet down the hallway. And then caregivers, nurses, uh orderlies and so on would find themselves leaning in the doorway in somebody’s room. And I’d turn around and there were two or three people listening. And they all had the same thing to say which is, this is so relaxing. Now they might say this is so healing, but you see, I can’t go there. But this is so relaxing and so tender, and we’re so grateful to have this.
[Moving ahead to Linda’s reaction after she realizes she’s basically penniless]
[00:25:32] Linda Khandro: And, and then after about a week it slipped into grief, and then I couldn’t stop crying. And I went up to the bank where these people were so concerned for me, and I walked straight in, and I said, “You were right. You were right, and I was lying to you the whole time.” And to the other bank, “You were right. I was lying to you the whole…” and to the other bank.
[00:25:50] Bob: Did you actually talk to some of the, like the person who was trying to talk you out of it?
[00:25:54] Linda Khandro: Yes.
[00:25:55] Bob: What was that like?
[00:25:56] Linda Khandro: Oh, it was very hard. They were handing me boxes of Kleenex, you know, because I, I had to, I had to own up, well the, the owning up to the lying was not a problem, that was okay, I’ve got to do that. But watching them go through a version of my anguish was really hard, because they were doing everything they could to get information from me, and they couldn’t get it.
[00:26:26] Bob: You have just had your, your life turned upside-down and $400,000 stolen from you, but you are thinking about how hard it is for the bank manager to hear this story.
[00:26:37] Linda Khandro: Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:39] Bob: Linda then goes around apologizing to everyone she lied to during the past 4½ months. And she develops a credo that still guides her now.
[00:26:51] Linda Khandro: I had to own everything. Yes, I did this, I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t know these things; I don’t live in this world or in that kind of a world. And I found myself having to sort of rely on a catch phrase, which I don’t like catch phrases as a rule, but it works for me, and that is, you don’t know what you don’t know. And I really and truly did not know that this even existed in the world. Really and truly. That’s the bald truth of that.
[00:27:24] Bob: You don’t know what you don’t know. She carries that message around and it comforts her, but the hardest part at this stage is telling her children.
[00:27:33] Linda Khandro: They were pretty frightened. I had written an email to all my family, most of whom knew that something terrible was happening but I couldn’t tell them. So I had written to my brother, my sister, my, my daughters, friends, everybody that I could cram into one email. They did get the printed version right away, like that first night. But then when I talked to my oldest and my youngest at the same time, you know they, they were like me. They couldn’t stop crying either. But it was very, very difficult. I know some of their finances are tied up with mine, and that means that I have hurt them by having to pull back on some commitments I had made. All three of them are using language now like, and again this is, this is hard, right, hard to say. “We will never let you be destitute, Mom.” I mean how can you hear that from your children? But that’s what they said and that’s what they mean, so since October we’ve had some really good conversations, and we have a couple of platforms where we can talk in, at, in, groups to each other even when we’re thousands of miles away. So they, you know, they are 100% supportive as are my friends, and I guess, I guess the support that I need so much is something that I never would have been able to ask for if the situation wasn’t as dire as it is.
[00:28:54] Bob: So how is Linda now? Well she is facing a long road to recovery. The criminals did steal pretty much everything she has financially and in other ways too.
[00:29:10] Linda Khandro: I have no savings anymore, essentially. And no work. I had to start looking for work, and I tried to get unemployment insurance and worked on that for about four months, and I finally gave up on them just a few weeks ago, but I found a food bank, uh-huh, so I’m getting groceries for free every, every two weeks and other support from local entities here who support people who have run into hardships like this. And there’s no such thing as pride in my life. The satisfaction that I used to have in the work that I did, or the music, or the artwork is fragmental. It comes and goes. This whole experience and these, this woman that I was talking to basically gutted everything. She took everything. Not just the money but yeah, my self-confidence, and sense of competence and sense of worth, and sense of honesty. She stripped it all away. And that’s what frightens me the most in terms of other people who might not withstand that.
[00:30:11] Bob: Linda has managed to get back a couple of small teaching assignments so she has part-time work, and she’s finding help in unexpected places.
[00:30:23] Linda Khandro: And I really do have an extraordinary, wonderful support system here. It’s, it’s a little fragmented, but I’ll just give you one short example, is the second of two benefit concerts being held by musicians for me is taking place this Sunday, day after tomorrow. And I’ll bring my harp, I’ll do some playing, other people will bring whatever they play and sing, and these are people that I’ve known for a long time or they may be totally brand new people, and in the break of the two-hour event, I get up there in the middle of the room and I tell my damn story, and it won’t take an hour, I won’t have an hour. I have figured out how to do it in 10 minutes. But then there’s a bit of Q&A so there’s another 5 or 10, or see me after, or here’s my email. Call me.
[00:31:13] Bob: Every person who hears you describe that you’re doing this, is going to think, “My God, she’s brave.”
[00:31:18] Linda Khandro: No, I, I know I hear that, Bob, and thank you, and that’s very, that’s very generous. I have had enough pain and enough sense of abandonment and isolation in my life that this does not feel like bravery to me. This just feels like I have to still live in this world. I’m 76, right? I’m planning to go for another 30 years, right, wish me luck, right?
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