The elderly are very shocked by the phenomenon of the ‘cuddly criminal’: someone who pretends to give a well-intended hug and in the meantime goes away with your dear jewelry or your money. In recent days, these kinds of criminals struck in Helmond and Valkenswaard, among others. The fact that seniors have been shocked of this appears Thursday at a meeting of various elderly organizations in a village house in Heeze. The message there: “The world is different from you than you hope.”
“It’s terrible, everything is terrible at the moment,” Annemie responds. She is 87 and extremely affected: “It is no longer normal in our country.”
Many elderly people in Heeze see the ‘cuddle beroving’ as the umpteenth way in which they are made miserable. This at a time when they also have to deal with fake agents and, for example, cyber crime. All things that are at right angles to the ‘you don’t have to call, come back and back’ in which they grew up.
For example, some elderly people respond in Heeze:
“Perhaps that is the characteristic of our generation: it is too good of trust,” says Leo Bisschops about it. He is the chairman of Seniors Brabant-Zeeland and in that role present in Heeze. “This is probably also an organized group,” he says about the phenomenon of the cuddly berboing.
“They hugged a woman on her way to her husband’s grave. And took a chain from someone in which the ashes of her deceased son was,” he calls some examples. “You’re tearing in your eyes.”
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After the stories from Helmond and Valkenswaard, Omroep Brabant also received reports of ‘cuddly berboing’ from Breda and Bavel. In the same devious way, elderly people have been robbed in the street in recent days. For example, an 88-year-old man in Breda was robbed of his gold ring and with an older woman the chain with the ashes of her deceased son was taken from her neck.
According to Bisschops, the sad person is that older people like to be addressed. There is abuse of their belief in the goodness of man, he says.
“Don’t be so unsuspecting anymore, because the world is different from you,” he warns. “And you don’t have to be ashamed of anything, so report it to the police as soon as possible when something similar happens to you. Then we can do something about it.”