An apparently Bay Area-based con artist was on the verge of scamming an elderly Atherton man out of $15,000, but fortunately his caregiver and family intervened, and the would-be con artist was taken into custody.

It’s not news to anyone that scammers love to target older people, who are perhaps a little more trusting, and often a little less sophisticated when it comes to modern-day apps and digital tools. KRON4 brings us the story of the latest attempted tech scam that targeted an elderly man in Atherton, in which a woman nearly scammed the man out of $15,000, until a caregiver and the man’s daughter were able to intervene and put the swindle to a halt.    

The scheme started with a phishing email, telling the man that “funds had been transferred out of his PayPal account without authorization,” according to the Atherton Police Department. That managed to get his phone number, and a woman called him posing as a PayPal representative. She convinced him to withdraw $15,000 out of his bank account, to supposedly pay for the unauthorized withdrawal, and instructed him to give that money to a representative that would come to his house.

“Fortunately, an alert caregiver contacted the elderly resident’s daughter who contacted the Atherton Police,” the City of Atherton said in a statement. “Our officers immediately responded to the location, intercepted the female suspect and took her into custody without incident.”

The suspect is not named in the announcement. But it sounds like she was apprehended at his home, and in the Bay Area.

There are a few other common scams going around these days. One that preys on older people is known as the “grandparent scam,” faking a young family member's voice and trying to get the victim to wire them a huge sum of money to get a kid out of fictional legal trouble. Scammers are also impersonating government agents, posing as computer tech support, and of course there are those fake FasTrak texts and bogus ‘unpaid parking tickets’ texts.

Law enforcement suggests not sending money or transfers to people you don’t know personally, to not click on links or open the attachments in unsolicited emails or texts, to call loved ones directly back if you receive a notice about some sort of financial crisis, and to not pay agencies who send texts or phone calls claiming you owe the government money. If you’re caring for older people, urge them to talk to family members or friends if prompted to enter a large financial arrangement.

Related: Beware: Those ‘Unpaid Parking Invoice’ Tickets Texts Are a Complete Scam, Everybody [SFist]

Image: Marques Thomas via Unsplash

Another company has announced that it's vacating its San Francisco offices, citing a shift to a more remote workforce.

PayPal, which is headquartered in San Jose, is planning to move its Xoom team out of its offices at 425 Market Street as of June 3. ABC 7 broke the news via an inside source, and the shedding of this office rent expense comes just ahead of a quarterly earnings call. PayPal's stock also just hit a 52-week low.

As the Chronicle notes, PayPal's Market Street office space was originally leased by Xoom, the Venmo-esque electronic funds transfer service that PayPal acquired in 2015. (PayPal acquired Venmo in 2013.) The SF Business Times says that Xoom has "a few hundred employees," who will now have the option to work remotely or from PayPal's San Jose offices.

PayPal issued a statement to ABC 7:

At PayPal, we are continually looking at and evolving how we can work in the most collaborative and efficient ways possible, and we routinely evaluate our global office footprint and spaces to ensure that our company and our employees are best set up for success. The pandemic, in particular, has taught us there are many ways in which we can work effectively while providing our employees with flexibility. PayPal remains fully committed to the Bay Area and to California and we will continue to hire into and invest in our business and people working within the state.

Fallout from the two-plus-year pandemic continues to impact the downtown SF office landscape. And as a recent Stanford study suggested, San Francisco leads the nation in its share of workers who do not want to be back in a physical office after two years of the WFH lifestyle.

In February, Slack put up its 205,000 square feet of offices at 45 Fremont for sublease, a year after being acquired by Salesforce. And Salesforce itself put up 286,000 square feet of offices for sublease at 350 Mission Street, but it won't be empty for long after it was snapped up by Sephora in January.

Google/Alphabet, meanwhile, summoned its workers back to the office starting in early April, and that included the offices the company has in downtown SF.

And this week everyone is wondering if Elon Musk is going to try to vacate Twitter's huge offices at 1355 Market Street, which have been largely empty for two years — and which he joked in a now deleted tweet should perhaps be used as a homeless shelter instead. Twitter already put up more than 100,000 square feet of its space in the building for sublease back in 2020 — and its unclear if it had any takers.

San Francisco's office vacancy rate was around 19% at the start of the year, and a new report from Cushman & Wakefield has it up to 21.7% as of the first quarter of 2022 — beating the pandemic peak of Q3 2021 which was 20.5%.

PayPal has taken to freezing the accounts of a number of high-profile personalities on the so-called alt-right who use the payment processing platform to fundraise — and they're not too happy about it. BuzzFeed has news of the recent actions by PayPal, which they've made without explanation except to say that the company does not "allow [its] services to be used for activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance.”

Alt-right white supremacist site Occidental Dissent had their account frozen on May 1 and "men's rights" blogger Roosh V had his account frozen on May 4, followed by similar action taken against the account of Based Stickman, a.k.a. Kyle Chapman — whose own alt-right fame only goes back to that March rally/riot in Berkeley, at which he showed up in a bike helmet, gas mask and cape, with a stick and a shield with the American flag on it. Chapman previously created a crowdfunding page on the site WeSearchr for a "legal defense fund" in preparation for his next arrest — it now has over $87,000 in it, but WeSearchr's PayPal account was subsequently "limited" by PayPal, so Chapman may not have access to those funds.

These cases, combined with others reported on social media, have caused many on the alt-right to denounce PayPal — along with GoFundMe and Patreon which have taken similar actions against alt-right personalities and causes — as having a liberal bias and suppressing their free speech.

Alt-right personality Baked Alaska referred to GoFundMe as a "left wing garbage site" after they shut down a campaign of his, and right-wing Canadian YouTuber Lauren Southern, who spoke at a Berkeley event this spring, said in a video that Patreon "essentially eviscerat[ed] the majority of my income" when they banned her last month.

This had pro-Trump media personality Mike Cernovich declaring that there's a need for "a free speech alternative" to PayPal after all these people were "un-platformed" by the company. But building a new payment processing platform is no easy feat.

Some have found luck using the crowdfunding site Rootbocks, which calls itself the "alternative, anti-censorship" crowdfunding venue. On their front page you can see a number of people raising funds to attend right-wing rallies.

Also, as BuzzFeed notes, a small invite-only crowdfunding site has emerged called "Hatreon," though it only boasts about 130 donors so far.

Meanwhile after Twitter has banned people like Milo Yiannopoulos over violating their terms of service, Cernovich has called for a "free speech alternative" to Twitter as well.

Previously: Pro-Trump Rally In Berkeley Turns Predictably Messy, 10 Arrested

Peter Thiel -- noted gay Silicon Valley libertarian, PayPal co-founder, and the one of the first Facebook investors -- recently penned an essay in which he suggests that the last time one could be "genuinely optimistic" about U.S. politics was just before dames got the right to vote. In Cato Unbound, a site run by libertarian-ish Cato Institute, Thiel suggests the following.

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron.

That is to say, women are prone to illogically vote with their feelings, especially when catching the vapors.

Silicon Valley gossip scribe Owen Thomas suggests one reason for Thiel's anti-XX-chromosome mindset: drugs. All kids of them, it seems. Read more about it at Valleywag.