Poison and Thievery

I added SpamPoison to this site. Don’t know if it will do anything. So far I haven’t needed word verification or moderation or any of that and I don’t want to. I want it to be easy for people to comment.

My old site is still under the control of a robot. Whoever writes the scripts that hijack linked-to addresses and turns them into entirely pointless foci of advertising are clearly relentless masturbators. I wish upon them bad karma and a general dissatisfaction.

What is it with people who take advantage of other people? A friend of mine was conned recently. Needed a loan but had no credit history and in desperation (and a little ignorance) turned to getting a loan off the internet. With cash so easily borrowed these days, it seemed plausible and the people on the phone, believable.

It’s so easy. You get a temporary voice mail system – they’re all over the internet – and pay for it with cash or a money order. You put ads out on the net, targeting people who are desperate and don’t have a lot of experience with real financial institutions – the most vulnerable, in other words. You offer “secured” loans, i.e. 20% payment up front, not unlike getting a mortgage. When people contact you, you speak very professionally and have them fill out very official-looking forms on the web. You tell them they will get the money within two days of them sending you the first payment. They don’t know that it is somewhat irregular for the payment to be sent via Western Union to an individual in Canada with an obscurely fake-sounding name. They are desperate. They need the money now. You use a cheap fake ID at the Western Union office and collect the upfront payments sent by all the people you roped in during the month the phone line was active. You never send anyone their loans. By the time they act on the evident fraud, you are gone, your assumed names forgotten.

People who needed quick cash to pay a fine or debt and stay out of jail or fix their car so they can get to work or pay a doctor for an emergency procedure, they begged money from their also-poor friends and sold their stereo and took payday advances just to scrape together the loan security and sent it to you, and you took it, all the cash they could get in the world and their last hope to avoid the sort of unrecoverable disaster that hits the working poor regularly – unemployment, overdue child support, no food for a week – you took it and added it to the money from all the other suckers and moved on and called it a good day. Nice work.

Most cons take advantage of the mark’s willingness to bend the rules for his own gain. A man is convinced of a sure thing, he need only place the bet or give his bank account number or front a fraction of the cash he will be getting back. Then he never gets anything back and can only blame his own greed. But some cons prey not on greed but on need. They prey on people who put themselves at risk not because they want to but because they have to. They are a thousand times worse than expatriate Nigerian officials or those young people on the streets of China who just want to practice their English.

I think of the con as the poisonous art of selling people something they don’t really need for far more money than it’s worth. There must be moral implications to capitalism generally – certainly to car salesmen. But it is theft, too, not just of money but, true to its name, of confidence.