Is your personal life, neighborhood safety, child's school safety, or workplace under siege by an unscrupulous person?
Maybe there's a bully, a thief, or a sexual pervert lurking on the horizon.
So, is it easy to call for help? The answer is no. Likely, you and you alone will have to take charge. Many authority figures will dive under a rock and refuse to help. But, keep going.
Consider these cases that have happened to our friends:
_ A woman we know was robbed of $3,000 on her credit card at her local mall. How? The cashier, a seasoned criminal who owned a vendor's booth, ran the card four times. Each transaction was registered as $750.
_ A group of people we know are presently under siege at a condo complex. Why? The condo board will not pass a pet policy. One tenant has dangerous dogs jumping people _ all senior citizens.
_ Two tenants, posing as business people, have tied up a commercial real estate property. How? They wrote a bad check for $5,000 in order to begin purchasing the small business. These people also wrote a bad check to rent a home nearby for themselves.
These are just three cases. We know of several more. Now, one would think that the mall administrators would come to the rescue of the lady who lost $3,000 on her credit card. Wrong. The mall did nothing.
We'll call the victim Deborah. She told us, "My bankers acted worried at first. The people I know there, and I know them very well, told me they would help get my money back. Wrong. They backed down quickly and left me on my own."
Deborah went to the police. They told Deborah they would "check it out." Ultimately, they did zero.
How did Deborah get her money back? She went to the mall and corralled the thief and the mall manager, plus a security guard. Deborah called an emergency "meeting" and got the thief to agree to give her back the $3,000.
The condo complex, mentioned above, refuses to pass a pet policy. The police told the tenants it was "private property" so they could do nothing.
In the past month, the dogs have physically jumped and scratched two women over the age of 80.
The police and the condo board gave these women the runaround. They were told to hire a lawyer. One lawyer told them he was busy with "real cases of injury worth a lot of money."
We advised the women who got scratched to find another lawyer. They did. They gave the condo board a deadline to pass a pet policy and evict the dangerous dogs.
In the scenario mentioned above, where people wrote bad checks for the business and rental home, they had one motive: They faked buying a business to make the landlord believe they had income. The landlord, who finally confronted them, found out they'd stayed at several homes for 60 days each using this ploy.
"Don't wait until you find an authority figure to help you cope," says Deborah, who got her $3,000 back from the mall vendor. "Round up at least two authority figures and call a meeting yourself. Never back down, or sleazebags will go on to hurt other people."
We would also add: Ask the news media to get involved. Public documentation goes a long way in pulling authority figures out of the woodwork.
