Supposing I Gamble...

I've been doing some reading on Reddit recently and discovered r/Scams. It's an interesting forum, mainly populated, it seems, with people pointing out attempts (sometimes successful, usually not) to scam them or asking if some or another message or the like is a scam attempt.

There are, unsurprisingly, a wide array of different scams out there, making the rounds of the internet. While the ever-popular 419 scam is still alive and well, and run-of-the-mill phishing scams are common, human cleverness in seeking to defraud their fellow man is eternal, and this poses a problem for even the wary internet denizen. I am, I will admit, something of the suspicious sort. If something strikes me as being off about something, I simply delete or report it, and go about my business. But I realize, especially now that I've been exposed to some of the stories that r/Scams has to offer, that my willingness to always simply walk away is something of a luxury. In many cases, what the scammers are preying on is the poverty of their marks. For someone in need of a better paying job, an offer of an executive assistant role may seem like a stroke of good fortune. For someone low on funds, finding a virtual reality setup or a smartwatch at a significant markdown from MSRP appears to be a simple matter of finding a fortuitous sale.

But, having the sneaking suspicion that something isn't right, they turn to Reddit, and ask: "Am I being scammed?" Often, it's because they don't know how the scam would work. And if they can't understand how they would be cheated, they're more likely to hold out hope that they've stumbled onto something good. Triangulation scams, which I'd never heard of before, work on this model. A criminal offers an item for sale at a good price. When someone offers to purchase the item, the criminal buys it from an online vendor, using compromised credit card credentials, and stipulates the purchaser as the recipient. The purchaser receives the item they paid for, and it's not unless or until someone flags the payment to the vendor as fraudulent that anyone is any the wiser.

But the most interesting aspect of the "Am I being scammed?" posts is the number of them where it's fairly clear that they're hoping (against hope, as it turns out) that the community will tell them that whatever they've come across is, in this one case, legitimate. The number of posts that ask, at some point, "Should I risk it?" is somewhat surprising. To me, anyway. As I noted before, I'm not in a position where something that seems sketchy turning out to be on the level would be a significant benefit to me. It leaves me with the feeling that I should be doing more to ensure that more people can be in that position with me.

News of the Random

I was browsing through the BBC News wbesite, and came across this video story of a man stealing a woman's wheelchair. The woman is in the chair when the man approaches her, and he puts a fair amount of effort into dumping her out of it, before attempting to make off with it. Other passengers swarm out of the train after him, and reclaim the wheelchair for its owner.

My first thought was "Wow. Must have been a slow news day in Britain." But I'll admit it. I clicked on it. I think I was expecting something more substantial than some random guy attempting to steal some random wheelchair from some random person in a random part of the United States. After all, this is the BBC that we're talking about. Surely, there's enough important stuff going on in the United States and/or Canada that something this trivial wouldn't have made the newsworthiness bar. While there's a part of me that responds to that with "Silly me," I will admit to being somewhat disappointed. But I suppose that I shouldn't be. New of the weird is popular everywhere, now that I think about it.

And while odd stories like this are effectively harmless, I wonder what role they play in that fact that, as Pew Research Center puts it, "public perceptions about crime in the U.S. often don’t align with the data," something which seems to be a recurring phenomenon. I was recently reading an essay on the Web (one that I'd neglected to make note of) in which the author observed that her overall mood and opinion of humanity tracked negatively with her diligence in keeping up with the news. And it wouldn't surprise me if the culprit was, at least in part, this habit of holding up random crime stories as if they were somehow important.

But I guess this is a side effect of the fact that most of the public at large, the day-to-day news isn't anything that they can take action on. So while news is often billed as informative, I think that it's often more useful, if that's the right word to use, as a form of diversion and/or entertainment. And I suppose that the ability to "tsk, tsk, tsk," at events happening elsewhere counts.

Mythologizing

I'd been under the impression that the now-legendary "419" scam had always been something of a small-time operation. Sure, a particular scammer might have a dozen or so people that they were stringing along, but that was the extent of it. So color me surprised to learn that a lawyer in the Dominican Republic has managed to rack up nearly 30,000 "clients" in a scheme to lay hands on what is supposedly billions of dollars that is sitting in banks after an ancestor deposited gold some 150-plus years ago. The story, by Joe Nocera, is a fascinating read.

What I found to be most interesting about the whole thing is the power of the myth that lay at the bottom of it. And I don't mean "myth" in the often pejorative usage of a false narrative, but rather as a traditional story which embodies a belief regarding some fact or phenomenon of experience. The belief that members of the Rosario family are heirs to an impressive fortune can be said the be the driving force in all of this; the current lawyer is not the only person to have formally looked into this, simply the only one to have told the family that they're correct, and that the money is waiting for them. They just have to pay some up-front expenses first...

Regarding the various Rosarios that have bought into this as stupid, greedy or naïve is easy. Perhaps too easy, since it does provide a convenient narrative for why they were taken in when so many other people have managed to see through this and similar ruses. Rather, I wonder what this says about the power of disappointment and disillusionment that people would go to what strikes me as such great lengths to avoid them. Maybe it's because I'm not desperately impoverished and wasn't raised with a narrative that says, in effect, "our current lot is not our genuine fate" but I find the tenacity with which the story of the gold, and the wealth that has since become, maintains its hold to be remarkable. I would have expected that everyone would have given up by now.

But I suppose that this is the reason why there is a reading of the Pandora myth that claims that Hope was just as much an evil as the other maladies that were in the wedding gift jar. I have a difficult time seeing how Hope isn't a curse for everyone except the lawyer.

Words

I think today, American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and the service that is given by our law enforcement officers. And they have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves―and if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.
United States Attorney General William Barr, 3 December 2019

So... What Did Barr Mean When He Said Ungrateful “Communities” Could “Find Themselves Without Police Protection?” Good question. Although I’m not sure that it’s a particularly relevant question. After all, it’s a safe bet that whether one reads it “as a not-so-thinly-veiled threat to communities” or as an oblique warning of the consequences of assigning low status to necessary services neatly (if not always exactly) tracks to a person's overall partisan affiliation.

And I wonder how much that partisanship impacted the speechwriting process. Not in the sense that Attorney General Barr set out to make a comment that Republicans would see as innocuous and Democrats would see as threatening, but in the sense that if the reactions to a speech are known beforehand, why bother being careful with one’s language? Peloton’s stock price dropped 9% due to criticism of a recent advertisement for its stationary exercise cycles. Maybe this is because it’s already at historic lows, but  currently, political stock simply doesn’t move in that way when something that can be taken badly is said. And personally, I think that it’s just as reasonable to claim that the Attorney General is treating policing as a “protection racket” as it is to consider the Peloton commercial “dystopian.”

It’s a safe bet that Attorney General Barr could have made the point that law enforcement is entitled to more respect and support than he feels that they’re currently receiving without having come across as threatening people. Then, if there were any discussion of the point at all, it could focus on whether or not one agreed with the premise that police officers are being disrespected and unsupported by the communities they serve and/or what their end of that bargain should be, outside of simply enforcing certain rules. (After all, being in law enforcement is a job. There are plenty of professions that one could make the point are necessary for healthy communities, but are constantly dumped on. Teachers come to mind.) But if the pump was already primed, with a belief that critics of the Trmp Administration and its members would find something critical to say regardless of the content of Attorney General Barr’s words, the effort that a different message would have required could be seen as wasted. And while it's possible to point fingers here, to say that the Administration’s critics are too strident, or the Administration is intentionally tone-deaf, at the end of the day, it’s the broader public that is going to have to be prepared to act. Political stock prices have to plunge when there are missteps (and then rise again when missteps are corrected) in order for people to feel the need to take more care.

Part of me wants to say that there is a problem with the Attorney General’s remarks, but the fact of the matter is that the problem is much bigger than that, and was well-entrenched long before Mr. Barr took to the podium. Good faith is going to be required to fix it. But as long as good faith is seen as a weakness to be avoided, it’s going to be in short supply.

BBS

I've been listening to several of my old CDs recently, revisiting music that I haven't listened to in some time. One thing that I've learned is that listening to songs for the music produces different results than when one listened to songs for the lyrics. I don't really know why I hadn't paid much attention to many of the lyrics to the music in my CD collection prior to this point. Maybe because I tended to use it more as background noise than anything else. But when I'm driving, I'm more in the market for something to actively listen to.

One thing that stood out for me is how many songs could be charitably described as "bitter breakup songs." I'm kind of surprised that they aren't considered a genre unto themselves, given how common they are. I was listening to one soundtrack album that appeared to have no less than four; which seemed excessive, given that the movie in question had nothing really to so with romantic relationships, let alone the breakup of one.

I'm perhaps fortunate in these songs not really speaking to me; I've never had an angry breakup with a former partner. But I wonder if the event is as common as music makes it out to be. After all, a common viewpoint is that there are so many bitter breakup songs because of the ubiquity of bitter breakups. Which would be something of a shame. Although I suppose that like anything else, songs about being okay with life wouldn't be very big sellers.