AOL recently got hacked

 
AOL recently got hacked and our contact list was emptied for mischief. Even before the occurrence, we received notices from friends’ addresses explaining in rather labored sentences their dire financial situation stranded somewhere. Soon it was our turn. We were unable to use our credit card in Spain (nice touch on Saipan, though mail had also been routed to Taiwan) and would our acquaintance "please remit a certain amount to tide us over until our return when we would immediately settle the loan?"

The Nigerian scam of assisting some highly placed official unfreeze some blocked assets through one’s bank account persists, and we actually learned of two in the Marianas who responded favorably (and greedily, costing $100K, we might add), but this last email sent through our AOL account had us stranded on a trip to Guam. It evidently appealed to the Good Samaritans in my circle of friends.

That we got the same message in six other email addresses we use made us ignore this latest intrusion. That’s until we ran into a Chinese colleague who runs a weekend English tutorial for lower grade students where I volunteer. She asked why I never responded to her request as to where she would send the monetary assistance.

She and her husband just had a baby. They are not exactly swathed in renminbi (he is an interior designer/constructor and she teaches English at a neighboring college) but she did not dismiss the possibility that I might actually be in trouble, so she got her family to gather the equivalent of $3,500 that my purported request made.

The request email was nicely written, so much so that our ST editor who also got a copy alerted me and commented that they even got my nom de plume with the signature quote looking right. The touch of authenticity came in mentioning that I was stranded in Guam (the perpetuators obviously did their homework).

My Chinese colleague was properly alarmed and she called my university superiors to inquire if they had heard of my predicament. The better side of good sense made her hang on to her ¥uan. Besides, I (the masquerader in this case) did not respond to her request (I did not get a copy so the scammers evidently got the routing properly rigged) to where she might send her reply to my "urgent" request.

Scamming is as old as human civilization. I was not yet 10 when an American vet widow in our delta town in the Cagayan Valley got visited by a couple of acquaintances adept at "hocus pocus." They got our neighbor convinced that underneath her house was a hoard of gold that can be discreetly excavated with heavy machinery and the appropriate structures to shield the digging from prying eyes. They actually handed her a brick of "gold" that was conveniently dug out of the sandy base of her stilt-supported house in the delta sand.

The sad story is common among the scammed. She emptied her savings of her husband’s benefits she was holding for her son’s college expense for materials and equipment, and it quickly disappeared with the mirage of the gold bricks. The one left in her hands turned out to be polished brass!

Presumption of innocence until proven guilty is a mark of American jurisprudence, not always followed in the observance but nevertheless an accepted guiding principle.

In practice, Chinese cashiers and officials reverse the formula; one is assumed to be holding fraudulent documents until proven authentic. Handing one of Mao’s red color 100rmb to a check-out cashier immediately triggers the ritual of fingering the paper, looking at an embedded image through the light-and carefully, without rush-before one is handed change. The red note is about $15 but everyone goes through the ritual.

Chinese papers at U.S. Immigration are carefully examined for the high incidence of fraudulent documents submitted. I once went to a Citibank office in Beijing to pay for consular service, and I was amazed at the number of approaches made outside the bank of services to produce any document one required. A whole street in downtown Manila used to offer similar services, and I often ran into mothers outside of the metropolitan centers who bewailed their misfortune upon discovery that their offspring’s diploma they labored and spent savings for was bought rather than earned.

Our most recent experience in our classroom, which we narrated earlier but worth repeating, occurred when two graduating students who needed additional credit hours to graduate but are already working (fourth year internship at the university means being actually employed in a company) could not attend classes, so they sent their friends in their stead. I take pictures of my 250-some students so I can get names and faces together (I refuse to assign English names!), and the two impostors immediately confessed to the ruse.

I’ve reversed Reagan’s dictum: Verify and trust, congruent to our hosts’ practices. Trust in balance with verification seems like a workable formula.

Internet scams will get more sophisticated as it is used to catch the unwary and the gullible. Meanwhile, I have this bridge in Brooklyn I inherited, and wonder if anyone is interested to buy a decor piece for their Kagman yard, or better yet, connect Tinian to Saipan.

Saipan Tribune