Wham Scam

Something interesting happened Saturday.

Actually, a lot of interesting things happened Saturday, including people so far round the bend that they needed a psychiatrist, not a dentist, but that’s a story for another day.

But this is what happened:

Now, I bought – like most Indians who have life insurance – policies from one primary source, the state-run Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). I have three policies from them, all bought together about thirteen years ago. I’m not really a believer in life insurance, but I get a tax rebate for the investment, just FYI.

So.

On Saturday – that’s 26^th July – at just after 1230 pm (remember that time – it’s important), I was at work when I got a phone call from a person  who identified himself as Rohan Sharma and started asking questions about my LIC policies. He verified that I had LIC policies, and immediately asked if I was still in touch with the agent from whom I’d bought the policies. I said I wasn’t. (Actually, the agent was an ex-girlfriend who is now not associated with LIC in any way and with whom I no longer interact in any fashion. We have...a history.)

As soon as I’d said that I wasn’t in touch with the LIC agent, the caller’s voice changed. He said he was from Future Generali India LIC Ltd. (a private insurance company of which I hadn’t previously ever heard until that moment). He said that my LIC policies had earned “benefits” of over 130,000 rupees, payable on 30^th December 2014 – these “benefits” (of which I had never before heard either) were allegedly the interest on my policy premiums, which were reinvested by LIC and FGILIC in the ratio of 30:70.

So far so good. But...?

But, this Sharma said, the money would not be paid to me since the company had received my file back with a notification saying “please cancel his benefits” and the amount would be then returned to LIC and my LIC agent. Horrors!

So – you understand that it was my lunch break, so I had some time free – I asked him what I should do. I’ll pass you on to my superior Rahul Khanna, he told me, and gave me a file number (ADN 17417) to quote. So I waited for a few seconds and was put through to this Mr Khanna, who for all I know might have been sitting in the same room. Right.

The first thing Rahul Khanna asked me – again – was whether I was in touch with my LIC agent. I said I wasn’t, and again at once I could just about hear his voice change instantly. (If I’d have told them that I was in contact with my LIC agent, they’d have dropped the conversation immediately.) He then went over the same ground as the earlier guy. I asked him what I was supposed to do.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll help you. I’ll give you some personal advice.”

Thank you so much, and what is this personal advice?

“You could buy a fresh policy from us,” he said, “one which matures on 30^th December. So on that day when your policy matures the sum will be returned to you along with the 130,000 rupees of yours lying with us.”

But there was a catch. “You’ll have to do it immediately.” Because if I waited, the file would be “closed”. In fact I would have to buy the policy immediately, right away. Like in half an hour.

How do I do that, I asked.

No problem, he said, all I had to do was courier him (to an address he gave me, in Pune) some things. What things?

1.     A photocopy of my PAN card (a tax card for Indian taxpayers).

2.     A photocopy of my driving licence (for ID purposes)

3.     Two passport sized photographs and

4.     Two cheques (Ah, you were wondering when I was going to get to that):

                  (a) A crossed cheque for Rs 20,100/- favouring Future Generali India LIC Ltd

                  (b) A cancelled signed cheque.

All these had to be sent by 2pm – less than an hour and a half, while I was talking to him. I told him I didn’t have a copy of my PAN card available, just to see how he would react. No problem, he said, you can send that later.

And after couriering these things, I was supposed to let him know the courier consignment note number (so they could pick up the envelope at the courier office, I assume) and I need have no further worries.

Why not?

Because as soon as he’d got the cheques he would provide me with a “secret log on” which I would have to use to recover my money at the appropriate time. Sounds legit, yeah.

By now, of course, two things were already screaming “scam” at me, apart from the fact that I’d never heard of any such “benefits” from anyone who had ever taken an LIC policy. The first was his extreme insistence on haste. What was the tearing hurry? How come, if Saturday was the “last day”, did he have to wait till then to call me, and then till 1230? Incidentally, the LIC working hours on Saturday are from 1030 to 1230, so since he called just after that I shouldn’t have been able to contact them to verify the situation. Also, it seemed to me that the rush was meant to prevent my taking the time to think.

And the second thing? Well, that private insurance companies are closed on Saturday.

As soon as he had terminated the conversation I walked over to the LIC office, which is only a short distance from my clinic. As I anticipated, the staff was still there, and I managed to speak to one of them. He told me what I already knew, that there was no such “benefit” due me. Just to check, I looked up the Future Generali India LIC head office phone number online and called them. The only person I got was a security guard who informed me, sure enough, that the place was closed on Saturday. He did, though, give me the FGILIC customer service helpline number, and I called them. What they told me was that their office never contacted non-customers in any manner and that this was a scam.

Meanwhile, the scammers kept calling me at roughly five minute intervals from 130 pm onwards, probably desperate to prod me into sending the cheque. I didn’t take any of the calls, and they stopped abruptly after 2 pm. Incidentally, these calls were allegedly coming from Pune, but my caller ID identified it as a Delhi number.

The whole experience was both fairly instructive as well as entertaining, and it gave a good window into the modus operandi of these criminals. It’s certain that they are either employees of FGILIC or have someone on the inside, who will cash the cheque for them. They also, without a doubt, haven’t tried this only on me; and I’ll bet that they get busy every weekend, when people are mostly at home and have time to talk to them, but not enough time to think, and no way to check up.

I’ve sent a letter describing these events in a more abbreviated version to the local paper, and in a much more formal version (with the purported names and phone numbers of the scammers) to the LIC here. Let’s see if they take any action.

I can imagine the scammers’ pleased anticipation when they’d imagined they’d got me in the bag, and their baffled fury when I stopped taking their calls. Well, at least they wasted time on me (not to mention phone bills) they could have used to successfully scam somebody else.

Like scambaiting, the great cyber sport where one keeps Nigerian princes and deceased Sierra Leonean businessmen’s daughters busy with outrageously funny email exchanges, that’s a victory.

Caveat insurer.

  

Wham Bam Thank You Scam

In the beginning there were the mugus. You know who they were – if you’ve been online at all, you will have got mail from them at least once or twice. “Dear Friend,” the letters would begin, “forgive my indignation at contacting you in such a manner, but...” and he would go into a description of how he has funds in a foreign bank which he’s desperate to share with you. Or she would have a heartbreaking story of how her parents were killed in a civil war in Darkest Africa, leaving ten million dollars, and she’s stuck in a refugee camp and desperate to get out. You know the drill.

I used to have a lot of fun with mugus. Baiting them is a superb cyber sport, but one needs both patience and an audience for that. I mean, what the hell’s the point of mocking mugus if you don’t have someone to laugh and applaud as you go along? And I’m not the Ebola Monkey Man, after all.

In recent times, anyway, the mugus seem to have disappeared. I can’t tell the reason. Maybe I no longer give off whatever vibes attract mugus these days. Maybe all the mugu mail is going to my spam folder and I no longer check my spam folder, I just delete the lot outright. Maybe it’s just that people are getting smarter.

Here, hold that last thought. What am I saying? People are not getting smarter. People are not getting smarter at such an accelerated rate, at least here, that some of the older scams are resurfacing. Like, you know, the text message sent to your phone saying “you’ve won a random phone lottery and send your contact details including phone number back to us.” If your phone number won the lottery, idiot, and they’ve sent you a text to the phone, ask yourself at least why the hell they would want your phone number?

Morons.

But these morons are everywhere, apparently, since according to the police they’re complaining that they were ripped off by people who promised them the money they’d won as soon as they paid the processing fees. I’d say the scammers are welcome to their money because obviously they’re too dumb to deserve it.

But a couple of the other scams going around aren’t that simple at all.

The first is the Facebook Friend Scam. This is apparently quite popular in India now, especially in this part of the country where the young have just discovered Fakebook. It works like this:

The scammer sets up a fake ID, pretending to be a young and attractive person living in a foreign country – preferably somewhere on the other side of the globe. He/she (or, for convenience, it) then befriends young and callow people of the opposite sex, and gets close enough to them to find out what they want most of all. They then say they’ve sent the dupe a gift of that item by parcel.

A few days later, then, the scammer or a confederate phones the dupe, claiming to be from the Customs and Excise, and says that the parcel has been seized by the department for non-payment of import duties or some other gobbledygook. The dupe is asked to pay the difference (an account number being helpfully provided) or else the parcel will be disposed of or returned to sender. Obviously, this “gift” being something he or she really wants, the dupe won’t want to lose it. If he or she contacts the “sender”, it says it’s so sorry and will send the money, but it’s going to take a few days, so please go ahead and pay it, honey pie. Of course once the money is paid, neither the “sender” nor the “customs office” is ever heard from again.

Who was that masked man?

Now in all these cases the dupe’s own greed is the motivating factor; nobody who isn’t greedy can be scammed in this way. But there’s another route to scamming, and that deals in something more powerful than greed: fear.

This, then, is the other new scam here: you get a phone call from a distant part of the country, too far for you to visit easily or conveniently, saying that a case has been registered against you in a court there and the police have issued a non-baliable warrant for your arrest. (This is more plausible than it sounds; the Indian police have been known to make false cases against people in order to ask bribes to withdraw them; I myself know a man in Goa who is, at this writing, defending himself in court after refusing to pay a bribe to have a false police case withdrawn.) They tell you that they are a law firm who are willing to go to court to fight your case for you and get a stay order on the arrest warrant, as soon as you forward a retainer to the account number they’ll provide. If you fall for this, of course, they will continue asking money for affidavits and court appearances till you wise up.

The essential requirement for this scam to succeed, of course, is that you have to be driven to panic and unable to think clearly.  Otherwise you might wonder, for example, how police in a part of the country you’ve never visited even know you exist, let alone register a case against you. And they try and pile on the pressure, pretending that the handcuffs are already clinking, so that you can expect the cops anytime. You cannot be allowed to take the time to think. Is that clear?

Because these are on the way. Yo.

Now, I can think of a couple of ways of turning the tables on these crooks. If your Fakebook “friend” talks about sending you a gift, insist on sending one to her first. Say that in your culture, it’s forbidden to accept a gift unless you’ve given one already. Watch her immediately try to wriggle out of being sent a gift, because that would immediately prove that the address she gave (if any) is fake.

And if the other lot call, just say, “Oh, my brother the police officer will take care of that. What was your number again? He’ll call to discuss the case with you.”

Evil, aren’t I?      

It's a Kony Game

Somewhere in the scrub forests of East-Central Africa is a man so evil that he is the epitome of all that is wrong with the Universe, a man so utterly vile that tracking him down and bringing him to justice is a Holy Crusade, one that should involve children from around the world.

It’s a Children’s Crusade, too, because this monster is allegedly a uniquely savage predator of children, pulling them away from their families to conscript them into his savage personal army; thousands and thousands of them. This monster must be stopped.

And there is just one force which can stop him.

If you think this sounds like the plot of a hackneyed Hollywood action movie, you wouldn’t be wrong.

For anyone who hasn’t cottoned on yet, I’m talking of the Internet’s latest involuntary star, the Ugandan war criminal and militia leader Joseph Kony. He’s the star of an internet campaign by an “activist group” called Invisible Children, who have made a video which went viral on YouTube and gathered many million views. If it were a Hollywood film, it would be called a terrific hit.

In fact, in many ways, it was like a Hollywood film, carefully constructed to elicit an emotional response with a minimum of thought involved. In fact, the very slickness of the video, its obvious attempt to make the viewer think as the makers want them to think, immediately aroused resistance and suspicion. Making things even more Hollywoodish was the involvement of “activists” like Angelina Jolie, who claimed “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t hate Kony”.

Really, lady? You don’t know anyone who doesn’t hate Kony? Try any of the more than 99% of the planet’s population who have never heard of him.

Just who might Joseph Kony be, anyway?

Born in Northern Uganda, Joseph Kony was a onetime altar boy who later came to command a militia called the Lord’s Resistance Army. This militia itself grew out of something called the Holy Spirit Movement, a messianic Christian cult of the Acholi people, which tried to oppose the government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museweni. Here is an excellent account of the LRA's origins.

Now, Mr Kony is not, actually, a nice person. Let’s be very clear about this; Mr Kony is a very nasty person, and his Lord’s Resistance Army is by all accounts an extremely nasty militia. Over the last three decades and a bit, it’s murdered many people, kidnapped many more (estimated at thirty thousand, if you believe the reports) to make some of them into child soldiers and sex slaves, and mutilated a not inconsiderable number. You’d say that his reputation as a villain has some justification, and the Ugandan President, Yoweri Museweni the Chosen One who’s supposed to defeat Kony and bring him to justice, is the right man for the job.

The problems with that are, actually, many.

In the first place, Kony isn’t the Ultimate Evil he’s painted to be. In fact, he’s not even a particularly repulsive warlord by Central African standards, and probably no worse than Museweni himself, whose own depredations were the reason the Acholi people rebelled in the first place. Museweni, a close ally of the Empire, is a man who’s up to his neck in war crimes himself, and is one of the worst culprits of the civil war in Congo – along with his erstwhile ally and protégé, the Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame.

While Kony’s LRA of course did use child soldiers, that’s an extremely common occurrence in sub-Saharan Africa, and quite logical when you think of it. Children, actually, make superb soldiers. They obey orders utterly without question, they have no intrinsic moral compass, and they lack a sense of self-preservation. They can be utterly and fearlessly brutal without even knowing the implications of what they’re doing. They are smaller than adult soldiers, require less food and facilities, and can be kept going with drugs like amphetamines as long as required. And in an overpopulated and impoverished part of the world, when they die, they can be replaced easily and cheaply. Armies all over sub-Saharan Africa have used child soldiers to fight their battles.

And if that sounds strange, it’s because when most people hear the word “army”, they think of a force with a centralised command structure with soldiers commanded by, and under the control of, a central authority. But most African militaries aren’t like that. They may wear uniforms and carry modern weapons, but in most respects they have more in common with their militia opponents than with an army in other parts of the world. Their generals act more in the way of warlords than officers of a military hierarchy. These generals fight wars for personal profit as much as for political or nationalistic reasons. Museweni is as guilty of fighting such wars as Kony, and is guilty of far more deaths.

And this is the Saviour the people behind Invisible Children want to aid to fight the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Actually, there are far more things that are wrong with that idea. For one thing, Invisible Children claims that they are not “overlooking” the crimes of the Ugandan Army, and yet are passionately pushing for arming that same Ugandan Army. This strange dichotomy gets even worse when one realises that the Empire has sent a hundred Special Forces to “train” Museweni’s army and pursue Kony, wherever he may be, and that one of Invisible Children’s prime aims is to ensure that those Special Forces stay where they are.

This is strange on several levels. First of all, though the Lord’s Resistance Army originated in northern Uganda, it has not been there for years and as far as is known is now over a thousand kilometres away. This is something the people at Invisible Children themselves admit – but nobody who watches their Kony video will come away having learned that little fact. The northern Ugandans themselves are severely resentful of the video’s implication that they are still at the mercy of the LRA; they have long since moved on with their lives and they want to be left alone to move on with their lives.

I said that the LRA was nowhere near northern Uganda. It’s also no longer the force it once was; at the best estimates it only has a couple of hundred fighters left and is on its last legs as an organisation. It’s hardly the source of ultimate, child-eating evil that Invisible Children claims it to be.

And as for the monster Kony himself? There’s something very interesting about him, which I’ll discuss in a moment. For now, let’s say that there are probably more pressing problems in Africa, and the world at large, than bringing Joseph Kony to book.

So why, exactly, is Invisible Children suddenly jumping on this bandwagon at this present time?

In order to understand that, it’s necessary to discuss just who Invisible Children are. The group’s finances are rather murky, to say the least; it doesn’t even have a good transparency rating, and it apparently had a big infusion of cash from some unknown source at about the same time those hundred Special Forces turned up in Uganda to train its army to capture or kill Kony. It has been accused of various malfeasances, and its members have been photographed holding guns and posing with members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. In other words, the group which wants the world to unite against one militia has no problems with hobnobbing with members of another militia.

Now, it’s not unknown that the Empire is trying to expand into Africa in a big way; Africa is ripe for economic neo-colonialism, stuffed with unexploited resources including, in the case of Uganda, the magical word: oil. As those of us with some analytical ability know, denying the “other side” control over oil is as much a part of geopolitics these days as controlling it oneself is. It does seem somewhat strangely opportune, then, that Invisible Children should suddenly set up a video demanding that the Empire’s soldiers remain in place to ensure Kony should be brought to book – and that in a place where he is not, and has not been for many years.

It seems even more strangely opportune that nobody, outside presumably his own militia members, has actually seen Mr Kony for years, and there is a strong and persistent rumour that he died some five years ago. If he is actually dead, in fact, that would make him the perfect villain; he can never be found, never brought to book, but must always be flitting around in the shadows of our consciousness, like a real life Hannibal Lecter with an army to back him up. The facts don’t matter – it’s the perception which does.

And this, I believe, is the actual plan behind the much-derided Twitter and blogtivist campaign launched by Invisible Children and its celebrity backers like la Jolie. Not even the most deluded individual will believe that tweeting STOPKONY is going to bring the monster to book. Nor will keeping soldiers where the man manifestly isn’t, do anything to make him answer for his crimes. But the perception of the danger from Kony, and the necessity for protecting children – that is what it will take for people of the liberal persuasion to promote, quite unthinkingly, a military presence in a part of the world where there was no military presence at all.

Make no mistake – the target of the Kony video and Invisible Children is the so-called “liberal” section of the populace. These “liberals” are extremely dangerous people because they can be easily brainwashed into doing precisely the wrong things by some clever propaganda. They – far more than the conservatives – are the ones pressing for an invasion of Syria. They are the ones who cheered the aggression against Libya and now look the other way while brutal Al Qaeda-affiliated militias terrorise that nation. They are the ones who support “humanitarian war” and can’t understand the oxymoron in the term. It’s no surprise that the Kony video has the blessings of Hollywood celebrities like Jolie; with its faux reputation for liberalism, Hollywood would never have got the support of conservatives anyway.

Even the paternalism of the White Man’s Burden, implicit in the idea that the “enlightened West” in the form of the soldiers Angelina Jolie and her peers want to go and hunt down Kony, is perfectly in sync with this kind of unthinking “liberalism”. A conservative would have turned away in disgust and left the "savage" Africans to fight it out; it’s the “liberal” who will push for troops to be sent and save those poor benighted lesser breeds without the law from themselves.

This faux “liberalism”, too, is the reason why children are the focus of the video, though the LRA has been accused of lots of atrocities towards adults. It’s because people react on an emotional level to children. Very few are realistic enough to see through propaganda using children as the USP, and even if they do, even fewer are bold enough to stick their necks out to expose that propaganda and be called cynical monsters. (That’s why anti-Syria propaganda sites like Paola Pisi's Uruk Net keep repeating the claim that the Syrian government are “child-torturers”, or why anti-abortionists keep calling foetuses “unborn children”; it’s emotional blackmail.) The image of a doe-eyed, tearful kid affects most of us on a subconscious level, because protecting kids is something hardwired into the majority of us. We react viscerally to it; we have no choice. And the propagandists know that.

And Invisible Children’s plans are not just confined to Uganda, either. In 2009, Obama signed something called the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act. Passed, in true Obama fashion, without Congressional approval, it

allows the US to deploy military forces in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan (at the consent of those nations) in pursuit of LRA rebels. [Source]

Remember South Sudan? That newly free, impoverished nation with border problems with Sudan to the north, with its own rebels, and with all that lovely, lovely oil? How about Congo, which has been ripped by year after year of horrible civil war, but which has its own riches under the soil? Now, with a manhunt seeking an invisible, incredibly malicious figure who may not even exist any longer and so cannot possibly be brought to justice, any nation which refuses to throw its territory open to forces “pursuing” him risks being seen as allying itself with him, and therefore part of this new Axis of Utterly Depraved Child-Killing Evil. Even assuming Kony is alive, he, in fact, cannot be tracked down until and unless he outlives his utility and a new and even more menacing enemy can be substituted.

On another level, there are critics who claim that Invisible Children is a scam. Of course, it is a scam, with Kony T shirts being sold and schoolchildren being asked to make donations for the Cause. But that’s merely small potatoes compared to the actual profits to be made from facilitating the occupation; so why is it being done at all? Isn’t it counterproductive?

I believe it’s being done quite deliberately, to provide a smokescreen; in order that those who see through Invisible Children’s tissue of lies and fabrications will come up against the scam and be content in thinking it’s just a con game, and not delve any deeper. And while everyone’s attention is focussed on the spectre of Kony, the real agenda will play itself out on the ground. It is a scam, and on more than one level.

It’s up to us to spread the word, far and wide, and make sure it does not succeed.

The Gold Crush

Among my relatives on my mother’s side of the family are a couple (an uncle and his wife) who could be called, politely, superstitious. Also, objectively, crazy.

For instance, these people have a son who was, in his younger days, epileptic. Rather than trust to medicines to treat him (medicines are so scientific, you know), they went to all manner of astrologers, fakers fakirs and sundry charlatans to rid him of his grand mal episodes. To no avail.

Then, one day, two men turned up at their house, proclaiming themselves snake charmers. So what, they asked, did snake charmers want with them? This: the snake charmers claimed there was a nest of snakes in the house; they’d discovered the snakes through magical means, and would rid my relatives of them for free.

And, lo and behold, in a short time they emerged from behind the house with a wriggling bagful of snakes. Far be it for me to be so uncharitable as to suggest that they had themselves concealed the reptiles there earlier. For they were honourable men.

They proved just how honourable they were by offering to rid my cousin of his epilepsy, by magic, absolutely for free. Not only did they know of the epilepsy (well, just about everybody in their locality knew of it, as well as anyone who had anything to do with the astrologer/mystic/shaman set in their town) but they – out of the kindness of their hearts – wouldn’t take a penny for their efforts.

The catch? Oh, nothing much. It was just that the cure would take all of a week of daily worship at my relatives’ home...the worship of all the gold ornaments they owned.

This is as good a time as any of pointing out the fetish-like love Indian women have for gold ornaments, even if these are never worn, and even if they look tackier than tacky. But then I’ve never figured out why anyone would like gold.

Anyway, so this was the deal: the snake charmer duo would come to my relatives’ house each day for a week, and spend their time worshipping the gold, which was to be sewn up in a pillowcase. The family could watch them worshipping the gold, of course, and keep it once the daily worship was over.

The first day of the worship, every eye in the house was on the pillowcase-full of gold, and as soon as the two great and honourable mages had left, the pillowcase was unstitched. The gold was quite intact. As it was the next day; and the day after that.

By the time the sixth day had come around, a certain level of ennui had stolen over the proceedings. Nobody bothered to keep a constant watch on the two Merlins, and it was kind of a pain to unstitch and stitch up the gold every night once the duo had left. So they didn’t bother any more. They could, after all, feel the gold through the cloth, couldn’t they?

So, on the sixth evening, the altruistic magicians proclaimed as they left that the morrow would see the culmination of the cure. They wouldn’t come as early as on the other days – but they’d come for lunch, and they requested a good spread be laid on for them. Afterwards they’d do the final rituals, formally return the gold, and all would be fine.

You know where this is going, don’t you? The seventh day rolled around, and a sumptuous lunch, fit for the palates of such august personages, was laid on...but said palates didn’t turn up. The hours passed...no magicians. People were asked if they’d seen them. Nobody had.

Finally, someone had the bright idea of opening up the pillowcase...and discovered, of course, fake custom jewellery.

To this day, these people still haven’t learned. They’re still slavish devotees of some “godman” or other, the "guru" of some sect near their town, and who I expect is merrily fleecing them. For once I can't say that I’m not on the side of the exploiters.

With idiots like these, serve them right.