“Congratulations! It is our pleasure to inform you that you have emerged as a Category “B” winner of the UK International Lotto. You are entitled to a prize sum of US $2,500,000.”
Lucky me! Imagine winning two and one-half million dollars without even entering a contest. All I had to do was open my email to find myself fabulously wealthy.
The only hitch I saw in the message was the following statement: “Due to the possibility of unscrupulous individuals filing a double claim, we suggest that you keep this award strictly confidential until your claim has been processed and notarized and your certificate of award obtained.”
In other words, don’t tell anyone about your good fortune; otherwise you will risk losing it.
Despite this caution, the notice entitled me to indulge in fantasies of being rich. I would now have enough money to travel everywhere in the world, first-class, without the annoyances faced by ordinary people. Daunting hotel rates would no longer pose a barrier to me, nor would eating in the most expensive restaurants.
More altruistically, I felt free to dream of sharing ample amounts of money with members of my extended family and with favorite friends. To relieve the poverty of other people, I could now establish a foundation that would furnish grants to those serving the poor.
Before doing so, however, it seemed prudent to check out what was known about my new benefactors. Could they possibly be on the level? If so, why were they singling me out to give me a bucketful of money when I had never contacted them?
After deciding to risk ruining my dream, I called the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office to investigate the legal standing of the lottery. There a polite and perceptive attorney asked me if I had entered the contest. When I answered no, he told me that the lottery was highly unlikely to be giving me anything.
The lawyer also referred me to a web site that provided information about the lottery. The main thing this source did was to label the lottery a scam. Not without a certain embarrassment, I realized how the tricksters at UK Lottery were out to fool me. Presumably, they hoped that money would flow, not from them to me, but in the opposite direction.
Fortunately, I always follow the rule of thumb never to reveal basic information about bank accounts and other data relating to my finances and those of my family. Even more resolutely, I would never send money to any organization unless I knew it to be trustworthy and doing something deserving of support.
One of the hazards of being an habitual computer user, and spending time online, is to receive hundreds of unsolicited and unwanted messages like the one cited above. Almost every day, I find in my email urgent letters from some alleged dignitary in Africa who asks me to help a person there to get out of a difficult financial bind.
The most recent message is from a retired colonel in Sierra Leone who offers me more than three million dollars to help him transfer money out of South Africa. Significantly, the officer wants me to keep the transaction confidential.
Do scamming scavengers prey on people like me because of my relatively advanced age? People in later life are often portrayed as ripe for the picking, so perhaps these electronic criminals cull us from the rest for an easy score.
Or they may simply play the numbers indiscriminately, sending out phony messages to thousands of people and relying on the law of averages to deliver some of us into their clutches.
Of course, you do not need to be a computer user to become victimized by a scammer. In 2000, the United States Senate’s Special Committee on Aging estimated that adult Americans, many of them in their later years, lose 40 billion dollars to telemarketing fraud alone.
The same committee put the number of phony telemarketing firms at ten percent of the 14,000 total. And they get away with their crimes: only an estimated one in 10,000 victims ever reports them to authorities.
If you are at all like me, you find it hard to believe that people act this way. I have enough respect for my fellow human beings that it’s difficult for me to believe that more than a few of them are out to get me.
Fortunately, however, my religious tradition has handed down to me a firm belief in original sin. That serves to offset easy optimism about human beings, myself included.
Strangers bearing gifts rarely act out of benevolence. More likely, they are out to get us. Experience suggests that they will succeed in this enterprise much more often than we like to think. For the most part, you and I are the only ones who can make them fail.
Richard Griffin