It is hardly a secret that most email messages are advertisements for enlarging either your sexual organs or stock portfolios. As much as I look forward to the truly gifted con artist who finally manages to combine these into one brilliant master scam, I am in the meantime, struck by how the Internet has left our inboxes and started popping up in other parts of life. Fraud, scams and get-rich-quick schemes are nothing new to our society, but because of the Internet I seem to be encountering a lot more of them lately.
Just this Saturday someone tried to coax me into one such shady deal. I was meeting a friend from home who was passing through Baltimore and, unexpectedly, he brought with him someone whom I didn't know. Once this rather plastic looking fellow got to talking I realized that he was trying to get me, and my friends, to join with him in some "revenue-generating" scheme wherein we would "help companies get onto the Internet," with no further clarification as to what that might mean.
Upon further questioning I realized that not only did he not know a damned thing about business, economics, or the Internet, but that his entire pitch came right out of those 3 a.m. financial infomercials. He actually opened by asking us, "Have you guys ever had a job you absolutely hated?"
By the time he got to the graph on his phony looking brochure that showed how the Internet allowed manufacturers and retailers to (honest to God) "cut out the middlemen," I was convinced it was all some big joke. All he needed was a pyramid diagram and the words "time-share," and he would have had every fraud clich8e in existence.
This was not my first experience with such schemes. One day last summer, I was in New York's Bryant Park reading when a respectable looking older man sat down by me and struck up a conversation. Eventually, he gave me a business card carrying some vague title about "e-commerce business development," and asked me if I would be interested in doing some work for him. He, too, was pretty hazy about what that meant. He called me up about a week later and became unnervingly pushy when I tried to get off the phone. By that point, I knew something was plainly not right, so I told him I wasn't interested and forgot about the whole thing, until this Saturday.
So far as I can tell, both instances were set up as pyramid scams. Not exactly the most recent innovation in the world of fraud. What is new, however, are the kinds of targets chosen and the tactics involved. It used to be that the elderly and other people who had trouble getting normal full-time jobs were the primary targets of such schemes, but not anymore. In both my cases the other person knew I went to Johns Hopkins, but each time they hoped that spewing business and technology jargon would browbeat me into playing along.
Empowered by high tech lingo, these new scamsters (con artists without the artistry) can target college students who often have debts they are anxious to pay off. Even more disgusting is the fact that these scams are now targeting young veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, like my friend. Thankfully, the House passed a bill cracking down on predatory lending to veterans, but as my own experience has shown, there's a great deal left to be done.
What amazes me is how successful these schemes are considering how obviously bogus they should be. Despite everything, these quasi-legal scams still manage to rake in millions of dollars a year. As things are, most people don't know much of anything about how commerce on the Internet actually works, and so they are easily taken in by voodoo schemes. Other people apparently play along hoping to beat out the scamsters themselves. Needless to say, they almost always lose.
Given that Hopkins is about to start a business school, we might consider pursuing this matter. I think it would be perfectly in keeping with our research university obsession to have a center for researching, tracking, and exposing Internet fraud. This seems like an area in which academia can and should take the lead.
As for the business offers mentioned above, I'm afraid I'll have to decline. You see, I just received this e-mail from the deposed ex-crown prince of Nigeria, and boy does he have a deal for mec9
--Vijay Phulwani is a senior political science and ancient law major from Johnstown, Pa.
