how do I scam thee, let me count the ways

 

Romance scams over the Internet:  a major trend, into which a lot of money disappears.  Many videos on You Tube tell us about these.

It's a sad and interesting phenomenon.  The person who is being tricked - the "mark" - tricks herself, along with the scammer tricking them.  Looking at this one video where Dr. Phil is trying to help a lady sort of get disengaged with the fantasy and see the reality:   Dr. Phil works at it, man, he's trying!

        Listening to the lady tell the story of her "relationship" with this online man, it struck me how invested she was in the story, she was as "in love" with the story as she was with the man.  It was a love story she could get interested in, and also be in, at least in her own mind.

Human beings need stories.  That's why we have the arts, and also, I'm now thinking, sports.  

        Sports is a story:  a person cheering for a team knows each player and what their strengths are and loves to predict how well the team is going to do in their next game, based on what he knows about the talents and power of each player and also what he knows about the opposing team.

Story.

        One of the things the scammers do is send a picture of themselves to the lady  they are trying to scam.  'Here's a picture.  This is me, this is what I look like.'  And they'll send a picture of someone else - Who?  Oh, just any picture they can get off the Internet, in some cases.  

        Dr. Phil just brought on "John" - caption: "His photo was used without his knowledge by an online imposter."

I had a surprise about a year or so ago, I had played some of these videos and the point came up on one, about people's photographs being used in this way, and, similar to Dr. Phil's video, they got the real guy on there, and it was somebody I knew! 

 

        In 1990 when I started working as a lobbyist, going to the State Legislature on behalf of a school association, there was a lobbyist who was my age named Jeff; he worked for six or seven different clients; he came from the largest city in our state.

  

        In the afternoon while we (all the lobbyists) waited for Senate and House to start, Jeff would do a crossword puzzle from a newspaper.

I remember he had the book Barbarians At The Gate, which had just been published, I think...

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