Running Scams
Dyke recently sent me a pleasurable video made by the YouTuber Scammer Payback. In fact, the pleasure it gave me led me to spend an hour or so more of my day watching more of his videos. Scammer Payback is an extremely IT-savvy superhero. He has a virtual computer set-up on which he has established false accounts connected to a fake identity. In other words, neither the personal data on that computer nor the accounts they’re linked to are real. Using voice-altering software that helps sustain the illusion that he’s an elderly woman or man, he allows phishers access to “his” or “her” checking or savings account on the virtual system, where they run their game to bilk their victim of funds. But he upends the game. As the scammers believe they’re manipulating him, getting him to trust them, he gains their trust instead. He encourages their belief that they’re engaging a credulous mark who, if they work it right, will be deceived into relinquishing money. As Scammer Payback keeps the hackers busy running their own scam, he tunnels into their computers and erases their files containing their victims’ and prospective victims’ data. Scammer Payback plays the worm, fetchingly dangles the hook, and the phishers bite.
For entertainment’s sake, Scammer Playback’s character becomes by turns pliant, difficult, and sporadically querulous. And it is entertaining. Knowing that the person straining at the line is a criminal whose job it is to steal the life savings of elderly retirees sanctions the viewer’s delight as the phisher attempts to stay friendly and on script, even as his frustration mounts. And then Scammer Playback pulls back the curtain, behind which he’s been playing an ineffectual, bumbling senior, to uncover the Wizard looming above it. The phisher undergoes various reactions by turns—avowed (and clearly false) shame, regret, and repentance, and then, finally understanding that they’ve been thoroughly played and lost their files, rage. Scammer Playback’s angling as he transforms phishers into the phished, and the great reveal to his targets that they have, in fact, been owned by a superior scammer who has nullified (at least temporarily) their ability to prey upon a number of unsuspecting victims—well, it’s easy to be deeply satisfied by the entire process.
And yet all may not be quite as simple as it seems. In one clip, in the midst of his fury, the phisher-cum-phished rails against “fucking Americans,” unveiling a generalized, hateful disdain not only for Scammer Playback, but also for his targets. Fucking Americans are rich, acquisitive, supercilious. We have more than most of the rest of the world because we have means and sway. We expect, or at least believe, that those in other countries admire our deftness as we glide through our lives, heedless of the hardship our own hoarding and use of resources creates for them.
Is this a stereotype? For many of us, most of us, all of us? To whatever degree the stereotype is justified, the anger against us is, if not justifiable, at least understandable. It creates hatred. And presumably, it is this hatred that allows phishers overseas to blithely bilk retirees of funds they depend upon to live through the final chapter of their lives. This hatred fuels their ability to guiltlessly feed, house, and clothe their families on a percentage of the money they manage to wrest from elderly Americans, whose relative prosperity (even when, by American standards, they are anything but prosperous) is viewed as the wages of a lifetime of sin.
We think we are admired. By many we are envied. And likely consequences of envy are resentment, a sense of injustice and injury, and a deep-seated anger that severs the connections that human beings might otherwise make with each other. It transforms the destruction of lives into retaliation for injustice and injury, into just desserts.
Is this destruction of the economic wellbeing of unsuspecting seniors defensible? No, of course not. Americans are human beings too. Just as it’s not defensible for a poor American to rob or burgle a rich one, phishing should be identified and punished. American-on-American crime causes real injury just as surely as these overseas scams do, and it is never justifiable. Nor does it ameliorate the seriousness of the crimes non-Americans perpetrate against us.
But the efforts to exploit Americans, while not defensible, may be understandable. Only if we understand it as more than simple predation—as one human devouring another because “human nature” in deplorable humans is like that—can we hope to reduce the suffering behind it, in the United States as well as in India or Nigeria or wherever. Only by recognizing that injustice may fuel such crimes, then acknowledging and working to correct it, can we advance good will and peace.
The satisfaction we get from watching predators become prey—our reveling in their discomfiture and collapse—is not worth the price we, as well as they, pay for inequity. Maybe instead of laughing we should cultivate good will and an awareness of what our system creates for others.