As any sailor can tell you, around Navy bases there's always a certain female criminal element that finds many sailors to be easy pickings. The following is about an old scam that I had been led to believe was on the way out but, apparently, it's still going on. The Navy may be trying to be family friendly, but the Navy is still not very family accurate.
This is how the scam would work. A female criminal type would find out the name of a sailor who was going to be out at sea for awhile, go to certain officials on base, tell them she was married to the sailor and needed some help. Many times paperwork would be initiated so this female criminal type would get financial benefits and base privileges. For reasons of bureaucratic negligence and often times because one department of the Navy has no idea what other departments are doing, many times nobody would ask the sailor or sailors if they had a wife or wives. Of course, many times the female types would over do it. I mean, c'mon, don't you think a female criminal type pretending to be married to four or five guys on the same ship is overdoing it?
Sometimes these females would get caught and slapped on the wrist. The Navy preferred not to deal with this type of fraud and many times just tried to push these types of fraud under the rug, so to speak.
Then, and I find this sort of funny, there were those females who actually marry two or three or four sailors and receive a bunch of benefits. If most of the sailors were out to sea most of the time, then for the wives back on shore it was "party time".
There's also a relatively small percentage of women who are divorcees who find out their ex-husband has enlisted or become an officer and go to certain Navy officials, say they are still married, and get base privileges and financial benefits.
One thing I found out was that once the female criminal types managed to con the Navy into accepting them as "wives", the Navy would give out all sorts of personal and private information about the sailor or sailors to these fake "wives".
I'm not sure if the other services have this sort of problem. Maybe they don't merely because being out at sea for most of the year enables mischief makers back home a lot of freedom to make mischief.
Posted by John at January 25, 2004 11:35 PM | TrackBackNOTE: I've got better things to do than erase the childish, immature, psychotic, obscene comments from looney Roger Weidner and his gang of illiterate morons, so just put your opinions at the Johnhays.net Forum.