Play a Sucker to Catch a Sucker: The Scam Courier Came for $32,000. Keene Police Were Waiting.

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Robert Greene’s twenty-first law says to seem dumber than your mark. New Hampshire’s phone scammers bet everything on a target who stays fooled until the cash is handed over. In five towns the courier came to collect and found police, because someone else kept playing the part.

On Nov. 2, 2020, a man who said he was the grandson of an 86-year-old Keene resident called with bad news. He had been in a car crash, he said, and he was under arrest. Bail was $18,000. That same day a courier met the grandfather in a shopping center parking lot and took the cash. The next day another caller, this one posing as the grandson’s lawyer, asked for $32,000 more. The grandfather went to his bank to withdraw it. The bank manager suspected a scam and called the grandchild to check. The Keene Sentinel’s account of what came next takes one sentence: “Police then arranged a sting operation that night to arrest Pimental.” Starlyn Javier Lara Pimental came for the $32,000. Keene police arrested him instead.

Robert Greene’s twenty-first law is the con artist’s oldest trick. Play a sucker to catch a sucker, he writes, and seem dumber than your mark. People resent anyone who seems smarter than they are and drop their guard around anyone who seems slower. Let the mark feel clever, and the mark stops checking.

New Hampshire’s phone scammers live by the first half of that rule and get caught by the second. Their whole business rests on the belief that an older resident on the other end of the line is the sucker and will stay one until the cash is handed over. The couriers arrested in Keene, Londonderry, Seabrook, Concord and Wilton all walked up to collect because nobody had told them otherwise. Somebody played the sucker one step longer than the scammer did.

The con needs a sucker

The scheme has a shape, and the Attorney General’s office described it in a Nov. 6, 2020 alert. A caller poses as a grandchild or child in trouble, often under arrest, and asks the older relative to keep it quiet. Some callers pose as police or lawyers. For years the money moved by wire. By the fall of 2020, the office warned, New Hampshire residents were reporting something new: the scammers were sending someone to the house to pick up the money in person.

That change is the weak point. A wire transfer leaves a sender alone with a phone and a bank form. A pickup puts a stranger at the front door or in a parking lot, at a time and place the scammers have to announce in advance. The caller can sit anywhere in the world. The courier has to stand somewhere in New Hampshire.

The scale is large and climbing. People in New Hampshire filed 4,374 complaints with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2025 and reported losses of $59,283,023, the bureau’s annual report shows. The 2024 report listed 2,340 complaints and $52,811,455 in losses for the state. The 2025 report says its state figures count complaints, not people, and Granite State Report could not confirm that the two years were counted the same way. Nationally, people 60 and older filed 201,266 complaints in 2025 and reported $7.748 billion in losses, up from 147,127 complaints and $4.885 billion the year before.

The law on the books is simple. Under RSA 637:4, a person commits theft by deception when he gets control of someone else’s property “by deception and with a purpose to deprive him thereof.” When the courier is arrested before any money changes hands, the charge becomes attempted theft by deception. Both are felonies in the cases below. The law that matters more here tells everyone else what to do.

Five doorsteps

Keene was one stop on a run. Elvis Guzman, the courier who took the $18,000 that Monday, was working a list. Between Oct. 27 and Nov. 6, 2020, two co-conspirators called 10 older victims across the state, and Guzman collected $119,000 from seven of them, the Attorney General’s office said when he was sentenced.

His last stop was Londonderry. On Friday, Nov. 6, an older Londonderry man got the same call: his grandchild was in jail and needed $12,000 in bail, and someone would come to the house for it. The man called the police before he paid anything, the Nashua Telegraph reported. When he told them a vehicle had pulled up to the house, officers went there, saw a man approaching the door and arrested Guzman. In December 2022 Guzman pleaded guilty to six counts of theft by deception and three of conspiracy and was sentenced to 5 to 10 years in state prison, plus $119,000 in restitution. Pimental, the Keene courier, pleaded guilty and was sentenced in February 2022 to 2 to 5 years in prison for an earlier $18,000 pickup in Nashua, plus a suspended term for the Keene attempt.

The script has changed since 2020. The trap has not. On June 2, 2025, a caller posing as a PayPal employee told a 76-year-old Seabrook woman that her account had been overpaid and that she owed $20,000, to be handed to a representative who would come to her home. Patch reported that she was told to lie to anyone who asked about the withdrawal. A family member recognized the scam and called Seabrook police. Two New York residents came to collect that same day and were arrested when they arrived. One of them pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 2 to 5 years; the other’s case was still pending when that sentence was reported.

Concord’s case shows the law in its purest form. Between February and May 2025, a retiree in his early 70s was persuaded by callers posing as Microsoft security staff, a bank fraud specialist and a Federal Reserve officer that his computer had been hacked and his money was at risk. He bought 48 gold bars worth $3.1 million and handed them over in four exchanges at a Shell station and a Hannaford in Concord, Patch reported. By May the FBI was involved, and with the victim’s consent an agent began talking to the scammers as him. On May 12 the agent, still playing the frightened retiree, agreed to hand over $250,000 more in gold at a Hannaford parking lot. The scammers moved the meeting several times. Plainclothes Concord detectives watched a Connecticut man drive in and walk toward the new spot, “constantly looking around,” and arrested him. He was charged with conspiracy to commit theft by deception and ordered held without bail. The charge is an accusation, and he is presumed innocent.

The newest case is from Wilton. In September 2026, police there said a computer-virus scam had pushed an older resident into large payments in gold. When the first courier came to Wilton to pick up gold, WMUR reported, “undercover officers were waiting to make an arrest.” A second courier came days later and was arrested too. Both are charged with attempted theft and are presumed innocent.

Why the act works

Every one of these scams depends on keeping the target scared, rushed and alone. The callers tell grandparents about gag orders. They tell a Seabrook woman to lie to her bank. They tell a Concord retiree his computer has been hacked and his money is in danger. Isolation is the method, because the con only works while no one else gets a look at it.

It also makes the scammer careless in one specific way. Once the money has been promised, the people running the call believe the job is done. They have read the mark as frightened and slow, and they send the courier to collect. Nobody in that chain asks whether the victim is still frightened, or whether the voice on the phone still belongs to the victim. In Concord it did not. The scammers kept negotiating with a federal agent, sure he was the man they had already fooled.

That is Greene’s law turned around. The scammer plays the panicked grandson or the helpful PayPal clerk to look harmless. The sting plays the confused retiree to look like an easy second payday. Each side bets the other is the fool. In these five cases the house won, because the scammers never stopped to think the mark might be acting too.

Look at who played the part. In Keene it was a bank manager, who noticed an 86-year-old withdrawing a large sum and made a phone call before handing it over. In Londonderry it was the man himself. In Seabrook it was a relative. In Concord and Wilton it was law enforcement. New Hampshire’s adult-protection statute puts the duty on “any person” who suspects exploitation, not only doctors and police, and these cases show what that looks like when it works. The person who breaks the isolation does not have to be the hero of the story. He only has to call.

A fair objection

There is a reason the Attorney General’s advice does not say to play along. Its 2020 alert told residents not to engage with the caller, to hang up, to give no money or address, and to call local police right away. A stranger coming to the house is a stranger coming to the house. Every sting above was run by police. None of it is a case for an 80-year-old to start freelancing as a decoy.

The bigger objection is that a sting catches the hired hand. The Keene Sentinel reported that the co-conspirator who made the Keene calls had not been publicly identified or charged when Guzman was sentenced. The couriers in these cases came from New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. The callers who directed them are harder to reach. In August 2025 the FBI announced charges against a ring it said had taken about $5 million from more than 400 older victims, most of them in Massachusetts. The alleged organizer called prospective targets in New Hampshire and Maine “fresh meat,” WMUR reported from the FBI’s announcement. Arresting the courier at the curb ends one pickup. It does not hang up the phones.

And the stings come after the damage. The Keene grandfather had already lost $18,000 before the bank manager stepped in. The Concord retiree had lost $3.1 million before the FBI agent took over his side of the conversation. The money already handed over in those cases does not come back because the next courier was caught. The FBI’s own numbers say losses are still rising.

The verdict

Greene’s twenty-first law holds in New Hampshire, and the state shows both edges of it. The scammers win by seeming harmless and by reading their targets as easy. They lose at the exact moment that reading goes stale and they keep acting on it. A courier who walks up a driveway in Londonderry or into a Hannaford lot in Concord is betting the mark is still the sucker. In five towns, someone else had taken that part.

The lesson cuts both ways for anyone in public life. The person who looks easiest to fool may be the one keeping score. And the one who is sure he has already won has stopped watching the room. In New Hampshire the courier who came to collect found that the sucker had been somebody else all along.

Next: Law 22, on the surrender tactic, tested against the New Hampshire record.

Fact check

Editor’s note: Commentary and analysis, not legal advice. Victims are not named. People charged but not convicted are not named and are presumed innocent. Case details come from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office and from the news reports cited; complaint and loss figures come from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. Statutes are quoted from their current text at gc.nh.gov. The GSR Power Index is editorial, not data. Granite State Report did not request comment from the agencies named for this piece; any of them may write to the address above and a response will be added with its date.