Distrusting everyone, everything

The scammers are getting smarter. We’ve all received those emails that tell us there is $27 million waiting for us in an unclaimed Nigerian bank account, haven’t we?

One arrived the other day, from “Miss Vivian Ibrahim Coulibaly, only child of my late father, Late Chief Sgt. Warlord Ibrahim Coulibaly…”

Miss Vivian needs my help, because her wicked stepmother — of course! -- is trying to swindle her out of her father’s illegitimately acquired fortune. I trashed the message. But to add credibility, Miss Vivian directed me to a source that I normally trust, The Guardian. The story was about her renegade father, not her. No matter — some victims would fall for the scam.

The same day, I received a second email that assumed I had fallen for scams like Miss Vivian’s, headed FRAUD ALERT:

“This letter is to notify you about your compensation as one of the scammed victims…”

To receive my $1.5 million compensation I should send them my name, address, bank account number, and a $102 handling charge. I trashed it too. That was followed by an email apologizing for “imposters who claim to be staff in banks and other regional payment centers.”

For the same package of information, I would receive an ATM withdrawal card authorized by both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

This letter contained no typographical errors, grammar mistakes, or wicked stepmothers. Nor did it ask for any payment in advance. I would only pay shipping costs. Trashed again. Then my wife got an email, from Fedex, that they were unable to deliver the prescription she had been expecting because there had been no one home that morning to sign for it. The message seemed legitimate. Because, in fact, my wife had been expecting a shipment of pills for her leukemia, that very day.

Yet we knew the notice had to be a scam. Because both of us had been home all morning. No vehicles had pulled into our driveway. The doorbell had not rung. The dog had not barked. Very disturbing. Because the scammer — whoever he or she was — somehow knew that the shipment was for her, not me. And that she was expecting a delivery. On that day. By that company. That she had to sign for.

That many coincidences strain my credulity. I think it more likely that someone hacked into either Fedex’s or Shoppers Drug Mart’s databases.

The scam seems to have been precisely timed and targeted. Unlike the incessant Nigerian scams, we have never received such an email any other occasion.

It leaves me with an uneasy feeling. I don’t know who to trust anymore.

If it’s that easy to get hold of personal details, how do I separate the legitimate from the fraudulent, the true from the false?

Are we moving into a time when I can no longer trust anyone?

It’s easy to recognize a scam when it comes from a bank where I don’t have an account. Or from the Canada Revenue Agency, or Canadian Border Services, because they don’t use email for notifications.

Or any recorded telephone message about Microsoft Windows malfunctions, or a zero-interest rate on my credit cards. One of which came, according to call display, from a local number.

But what do I do with a cautionary notice from PayPal that someone has accessed my account to pay a bill to someone else I have never heard of? Ignore it, and expect it to go away? Click the link to deny the transaction, and perhaps get sucked into something I don’t want?

I grew up thinking I could trust established businesses. They would warn me of any risks associated with their products. No, they wouldn’t.

For decades, giant corporations deliberately withheld information about the dangers of alcohol, tobacco, coal, oil, painkillers, and refined sugar. Long after asbestos was banned in Canada as a cause of lung cancer, the Canadian asbestos industry lobbied to have our governments help them market asbestos aggressively to less enlightened countries.

Meanwhile, governments deliberately misled us about the supposed dangers of marijuana, animal fats and peace movements.

And the electronics industry has yet to acknowledge that wireless transmissions can have any health effects at all.

Our society used to run on trust. Now I start feeling that everyone’s out to take advantage of me.

I’m beginning to treat everything with suspicion unless it comes from someone I already know. And maybe even from some of them.

And I don’t like living in that kind of climate.

Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca. This column normally appears on Saturday.