Hard Times is Boom Time for Scammers
The incidence of scams, be it financial, political or religious scam, have always been present in human trajectory of life as evidenced in many investigative, legal and journalistic materials available today. There are, however, a number of factors that give rise to the crime of scam, worthy of mention.
The first happens to be the issue of family structure and child upbringing method. The family being the primary medium of early human education remains a strong point of reference in our mind which influences our future actions. The child unwittingly watches and copies the utterances and behavior of his or her parents believing ingenuously that it symbolises the right attitude to societal lifestyle. Common sense amply demonstrates that the smaller the family size, the easier for parents to give appropriate attention to each child’s upbringing.
The second reason happens to be the neighbourhood one resides. This actually determines to a great extent the type of friends the child keeps, as well as the corresponding influences he or she acquires as he or she goes into maturity. As the saying goes; tell me with whom you go and I will tell you who you are. We all know that it is in fact not easy to restrict free dissemination of what transpires in an over-crowded neighbourhood setting. It therefore follows that it will take extra effort by parents to dissuade the child that most of what he or she sees or hears are not the correct societal attitude.
The subject of this write-up, however, remains the relationship between Hard Times and Scams. This linkage has always been evident in human reality because life itself has continually presented different facets of combined up and down periods. During hard times the human instinct spurs him or her to search for a quick solution to assuage the imminent anguish.
In the context of this truth as present in our country Nigeria today, the PMB government is putting in place a number of mandatory fiscal measures aimed at enforcing the checks and balances necessary to control the excesses that have persisted in our fiscal system for decades. These fiscal measures have brought about limited extravagant spending on the part of public and private organisations, thereby reducing considerably the usual extra cash flow in circulation.
Most Nigerians are not accepting, easily, this sudden economic downward alteration no matter how optimistic the promised end results are sounding. The tendency of man to consider short-cut solutions in the face of prevailing difficulty is pushing some feeble minded citizens to accept all manner of promises of quick way out from individuals both known and unknown.
Take the case of this working class woman who, days after the loss of her ATM Card, received a phone call from an unknown person who posed as a bank official, telling her that her ATM Pin has to be updated without which she might not be issued a new ATM card. The caller demanded details of her ATM Pin which the naïve woman gave out. At the end the obvious happened and the poor woman had nothing left in her bank account.
Consider also another pathetic case of this unfortunate family whose child had developed a strange illness. The inexperienced parents, after treating the child with some prescriptions drugs suggested by a nearby chemist shop owner, decided to take him to a miracle Pastor. The Pastor, being one the many sharp-knife new generation brands, at that point made promises of quick healing but demanded some money to buy the religious materials needed to perform the miraculous healing. The demands went on one after another until the family exhausted their savings. It was in their attempt to borrow some more money to send to the miracle Pastor that someone told them his own child had suffered a similar illness and directed the family to the state hospital were the child was treated by specialists and the illness was cured.
In each of the cases above, the victims were quite naïve. Worst still they had limited back-up funds to keep them going on, as such, they desperately wanted a quick solution to their predicament. This led them to accept promises of quick solutions from individuals not well known to them.
The list of these fraudsters’ schemes is endless. The lesson that everyone should learn is that scammers/fraudsters are always nearby waiting to take advantage of our weak moment to rip us off our hard earned money. Bearing this single fact