Several posts ago, I outlined the efforts and frustrations I encountered with scammers as I intervened on behalf of an old friend. I listed the scammer’s email address and the name he/they used at the time. Beside the blog entry I continued to contact state and federal agencies as well as Yahoo, which provided the email account (legitimate or not) to the scammer. I must commend Yahoo on its swift action in this matter although company policy prohibited it giving the details of the measures taken against an account holder to a third party. I am assuming that email address was shutdown; however, there are no guarantees that anything more than that occurred –the crooks will simply migrate to another free email account and resume operations. I retain no optimism with regard to preventing the scam from reappearing in a slightly more resistant strain.
What I did discover is how difficult it is to contact any party, which claims that it is interested in investigating, prosecuting, and preventing fraud over the internet or by email. Of the government agencies, both state and federal, that I contacted successfully, none have responded to date. Other sites were inoperable (throwing copious lines of PHP and database errors) or simply a maze one would suspect that were specifically designed to prevent reporting scam and fraud rather than serving, at the very least, in the capacity of a sympathetic ombudsman.
Scam and fraud will continue to thrive as long as there are people who are not able to shut out the seductive whisper of greed, the ever-present get-rich-quick scheme, the something-for-nothing ploy — all variations on the creato ex nilo myth familiar to Christian apologists. Al Jolson once crooned the best things in life are free. He was right, too; however, his epiphany came upon reflection of the nature of that which we share, which intimates the essence of our being rather than that which we possess and by which are in turned possessed. While our world tends now to eschew romanticism, there are far worse things than a world where Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats might still pour their genius into lines of poetry on a craggy hill overlooking a verdant valley awakening below it.
