This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/scams by /u/USMC0317 on 2025-07-08 01:03:31+00:00.
So my wife and I are both busy professionals, and we pay my mother (72F) to essentially nanny for us during the week. She comes over in the morning before we head off to work, takes the kids to school during the school year, picks them up if we’re not off work yet, and on days they don’t have school, she stays at our house with our kids. We pay her because my mom and dad basically live off social security and retirement, so we wanted to help support them, not ask her to do full time nannying for free. That’s just the background for informational purposes.
Because she is at our house alone with our kids all the time, my 11 year old started telling us probably 6-8 months ago that grandma was talking on the phone to some man, and telling this person loads of private information about herself, my wife and I, our kids, where we live, what we do for work, etc. essentially vastly over sharing tons of information that is no one’s business. We confronted her about it immediately and insisted she not share any information about us or our family with anyone, she agreed and according to our kids it seems to have stopped. However, our kids (being kids) have snooped over grandmas shoulder and read some of her text messages. They told us small bits that sounded fishy, so the other day we managed to snag grandmas phone when she was distracted and looked through her messages.
This is where shit gets weird. She thinks she is in a romantic relationship with Kevin Costner… Kevin Costner the famous movie and TV star… and apparently Kevin Costner is down on his luck right now and has been “borrowing” money from my mother for god knows how long, with promises that “his manager” is going to pay her back. We have no idea how much money she has sent this person. There were also multiple instances of this person asking for security codes that were sent to my mother’s phone, and she immediately gives him the code. So we have no idea how much money she’s given him, or what accounts she has given him access to. We do not have access to her bank accounts to check if he has been stealing money directly from her accounts.
Now here’s our problem: not only do we want to help her and break her from this very obvious and ridiculous scam, but how do we even bring it up, considering we obtained all this information essentially from our kids snooping, and then us going through her personal phone without her knowledge or permission. I understand we didn’t do the right thing by snooping through her phone, but she is clearly getting scammed super hard core and we just want to put an end to it.
Edited to add: All of these messages were on some app called Zangi.