I am pleased to tell the world, my troubles are over! That’s right -- the days of scrabbling to pay bills, economising, belt-tightening and similar self-denial are all through. Or will be, in a few weeks. You see, I have been chosen, out of all the people in the world, to do a lady a service, for which I shall be amply rewarded.
It was completely unexpected, but I received an e-mail from the widow of the late Minister of Justice for Sierra Leone. It seems that this poor gentleman, who was completely unknown to me, perished during a recent coup d’etat and there now remains the matter of the disposal of his fortune. Over the years, no doubt the result of wise investments and stringent economies with the housekeeping money, he had managed to accumulate a fortune of some fifty million dollars. By rights, his widow should inherit this dosh but due to some red tape it’s all tied up in a bank somewhere and she needs my help to get it out. And this is the amazing part -- all I have to do is pass on to her my bank details. She will transfer all the money to my account, all fifty million dollars of it, and I can then pass it on to her. For this I shall receive ten percent. Ten percent! That’s something in the region of five million dollars, just for handing over my bank details. Who says that there’s no such thing as easy money? There is a small administration fee to pay, and since the widow can’t pay it right now, I’ll send it to her and she will refund it to me as soon as soon as her late husband’s fortune is in her hands. Thirty-thousand dollars, it is. I don’t actually have thirty thousand dollars right now but I’ll get a bank loan. It’s a sure fire thing, though, because I’ll be paid back very soon. What’s the interest on thirty grand for a few days anyway? I’ll go to the bank tomorrow morning and organize the loan and cable it to the widow. Then I think I’ll go to work and tell my boss where he can stick his lousy job. This is really a godsend. And in the same week that my wife gets an e-mail telling her she has won the jackpot in the British lottery, without even having to buy a ticket.
It’s all a con, of course, and I expect you have often received e-mails like the one described, and you probably delete them without bothering to read them. They are sent out daily by the thousand from, I believe, Nigeria, offering the temptation of something for nothing. Well, almost nothing: a small fee, to be refunded in due course. The amazing thing, the thing that utterly defies belief, is that people have fallen for this scam in great numbers. They have forwarded their bank details and in many cases have been cleaned out, and have paid “administration fees” of tens of thousands of dollars, which of course they never see again.
How on earth anyone can fall for so obvious a scam is beyond me but there are obviously people whose thought processes are exactly as described in the first two paragraphs of this posting. I’ll never forget reading about some couple for Topeka or Milwaukee or somewhere, who were found wandering round a pharmacy in Wick, a small town in northern Scotland, looking for a bank. They had received a scam e-mail, decided that it was on the up and up, and without seeking advice from a lawyer or an accountant, they gladly forwarded forty thousand dollars by Western Union to an address in Africa, after which they were told to go to a bank in the U.K. where, upon identification, their millions would be handed over to them. The address given was this little mom and pop pharmacy in Scotland. The thing that really strikes me is that even after they discovered that they had been sent to a pharmacy, they still wandered around inside it, looking for the bank, no doubt expecting to see it nestling between the painkillers and the incontinence supplies.
Maybe such people are too stupid to own money anyway. and we shouldn’t be too upset when they let someone part them from it. No sympathy from me, anyway. The cons we should worry about are the ones we read about daily, where people have their identities stolen and are financially ruined. I take what precautions I can, as I expect you do too. I never throw any financial document away without shredding it, especially those pre-approved credit card applications, and those cheques the credit card companies send me every week, though I never make use of them. I never give out my social security number these days and when I pay bills online I always clear my cache straight afterwards, destroying any temporary files with a shredding program. Maybe that’s a bit paranoid, but so far it seems to have worked.
So I am wondering how many cons I have fallen victim to in my life. The best ones, of course, are where the victim doesn’t know he has been conned, so maybe there are more than I realise, but I can’t think of any right now. Not serious ones anyway. I remember being approached in the street in Bangkok by a man who told me that he was security guard at my hotel and that he recognized me. He went on to say that because I was a guest at “his” hotel he could organize for me very special low rates for anything I wanted, and he went on to give me a long list of choices: pretty girls, young boys, foreign currency, cocaine, dope, jewellery, watches, rented motorbikes. All I had to do was say what I would like, give him a good faith deposit in any currency I happened to have in my wallet, and he would meet me later with the person or object of my desire. I then asked him to tell me what hotel I was staying at, and when he couldn’t name it I smiled and walked off. Thai supposedly has no swear words in it, but he did seem able to express himself most effectively!
Of course, con artists and hoaxers are around us all the time, and for your consideration I offer you two sites, here and here, which list many cons, hoaxes and urban legends for your entertainment and edification.
Sometimes it’s hard not to feel at least a frisson of admiration for the con man and the practical joker, such as the man who “sold” the Eiffel Tower for scrap metal to a group of tourists, or the pranksters who masqueraded as an Indian maharajah and his entourage and inspected the British naval fleet at anchor sometime in the twenties. And people still talk about the BBC’s wonderful April Fool’s Day TV broadcast back in 1957, all about the bumper spaghetti harvest in Italy and Switzerland, with film of farm workers plucking the fully grown noodles off the trees in the alpine spaghetti orchards.
One con I heard of only recently -- and because of its simplicity I have nothing but admiration for it -- took place in the USA shortly before the Second World War. In fact, I’m not even sure it was illegal. A man placed an ad in a local newspaper that said simply “Hurry, hurry! This is your last chance to send in one dollar.” and it gave P.O. Box address. People being what they are, he received a very handsome crop of greenbacks. You have to admire that!