Does $36 million buy some common sense?

August 23, 2008

Anne Fairbairn - image from The Age

Recently, a couple of articles appeared in The Age about how $36 million was lost by Australians to Nigerian scams. The first article was about the high number and the details of the scams, while the second article (titled ‘Poet pays price of naivety’) presented the case of Anne Fairbairn AM, who was a ‘victim’ of one of the scams.

$36 million is a lot of money. An awful lot of money. That people are willing to throw that kind of money away in a bid to make a profit from a completely unknown Nigerian ‘government official’, ‘prince’ or whatever is a sad reflection of the average level of intelligence that passes for common sense these days. It’s not just a lot of people losing a little bit of money each, either. According to The Age articles, individuals have lost up to $35,000 and businesses up to $5 million. Just how you manage to invest $5 million of your companies money in a scam in the first place boggles the mind.

Increasingly, it seems that people are losing the ability to rationally make decisions, particularly when they are in front of a computer for some reason. As any technologically competent person who has instructed someone else how to use a program will have experienced, many seemingly intelligent people are suddenly unable to read or comprehend what is on a computer screen in front of them. The question “How do I compose an email?” requiring the answer: “Press the button with ‘compose’ written on it” is an all to common experience.

Unfortunately, this also relates to how people deal with the contents of their email. Things that would be absolutely preposterous if they were encountered in everyday life are seriously considered. You wouldn’t buy Viagra from some guy who approached you on the street, why the hell would you buy it from some unsolicited and poorly crafted email?

So, looking at the Fairbairn article offers a crystal clear example of this kind of thinking. To recap the article, Fairbairn “doesn’t know much about technology and rarely uses a computer or mobile phone”. After receiving an email claiming to be from Yahoo!, she replied to it with her details, including the account’s username and password. The scammers were then able to use the account to send out a request to her contact list that she urgently required money after being stuck in, of all places, Nigeria. Unbelievably, some people who received the email actually sent money via Western Union as requested.

Starting with Fairbairn: If you don’t know much about technology, you should be particularly cautious. You don’t dive into unknown water without checking the depth. This applies not just to technology but to anything – if you don’t know something, you start out slow and suspect that things might not be has they seem. If someone came up to her in the street and asked for the key to her post office box, what do you think the answer would be? It’s the same thing. However, my favourite quote of the article from Fairbairn is:

Being an idealist – and I always have been pretty naive – I trust everyone … I just didn’t know it was possible to be a victim of this sort of thing.

Now surely this is one of the most pathetic things I’ve heard in recent times. It’s one thing to be an idealist, but it’s quite another to be this unrealistic. I’m pretty sure you can work out which house is hers by the open front door and valuables lying on the front step, as surely noone would come and take them. For this reason, I have no sympathy for what has happened. In today’s society, you have a certain level of responsibility to ensure your own security, and if you do not maintain that level of responsibility, you have no right to even be surprised, let alone upset, when something adverse happens as a direct result.

However, Faribairn herself got off on this quite lightly – after all, it was only her email account that was compromised. There was another level of incompetence in this story: the people that sent money. This is probably a more serious level of ineptitude than Faribairn’s alone; after all, where is the responsibility in sending money (no small amount either; $2500 was requested in the email) via a notoriously insecure method (Western Union does not keep details of transactions, for ‘privacy reasons’, according to The Age) without properly investigating the situation?

These are the people who really are bereft of any common sense. In this case, the $2500 they sent off without a thought in the world truly is a stupidity tax. If anyone asks you for money, particularly if it’s thousands of dollars, surely you make sure that everything is legitimate. Am I the only person that this seems blindingly obvious to? Sometimes I’m amazed that people like this manage to survive day to day.

A follow-up article that appeared a couple of days later quoted the Nigerian high commissioner, Sunday Olu Agbi, as saying that, with regard to the traditional 419 type of ‘Nigerian’ scams, “people who send their money are as guilty as those who are asking them to send the money”, as it is their greed that leads them into ‘investing’ in the fictitious, but still shady, deals, such as transferring money out of the country illegally. Understandably, it is the wider population and government of Nigeria that is paying the price of the scams and the impact has been felt in legitimate businesses. As it is their lack of judgement, common sense and attempt at getting rich quick that compounds the problem, Olu Agbi places the ‘victims’ who perpetuate the profitability of the scams in the same category as the scammers and worthy of arrest themselves.

To sum up, I don’t feel any sense of sympathy to Fairbairn, nor to her acquaintances who lost money in the scam. Not when the ruse was so obvious and so easy to detect if anyone had taken the time to exercise some common sense. If anything, it is to Olu Agbi and other honest Nigerians that I feel bad for, as the reputation of their country is slowly being destroyed by both the scammers and those who take part in the scams. However, I do feel that Fairbairn’s story is an accurate depiction of the incompetence shown by many people and the sheer lack of common sense used in today’s society.

If $36 million dollars in stupidity tax is the price we have to pay for common sense to start making an appearance, I’d say we got a bargain.

(edit – title changed, original was bad)

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