Comment on Lemmings, please give us your info dump.
tomiant@piefed.social 1 week ago
Twice we got scammed. Well once for real, I caught the second one. I only realized the first one after my parents were already gone. My brother went on a solo psycho-journey when I was like 14, trans-Siberian railway through Russia and Mongolia, ended up in China. He was perhaps 19 at the time. A couple months in we got a call from China. Chinese embassy say my brother is in trouble. They read back his information, everything on the passport, is this him? Yes, it is. Keep in mind this was in the 90’s when international calls to the other side of the planet cost actual money by the minute.
My parents spoke very broken English, and I was too young to speak properly to handle something like this, so there was a bunch of back and forth over several days, but it was clear to all of us that he was in trouble, and needed us to send money to get him out of whatever it was. China, ffs. I don’t remember, shit I don’t know even how much they ultimately sent, but it was likely by my estimates around $1500- a very solid chunk of change for our not necessarily struggling but not exactly thriving family either.
He came back a year later or so, and I don’t know why but the whole debacle kind of never came up at the dinner table, until just like a year or so before my mom and dad both passed. We were all sitting after dinner, drinking and telling the usual family stories, and it came up, and we all laughed about how crazy that shit was to deal with back home when he was on his crazy first trip of his life and had to send money to China. He didn’t laugh. He hadn’t any clue what the fuck we were talking about, and nervously laughed it off.
At the time I just shook my head, of course he wouldn’t remember when someone else bailed him out and saved his ass, narcissistic piece of shit as he is. Only after they passed did I realize, oh shit. There was no embassy, there was no emergency. Some entrepreneurial Chinese hostel manager just took down his info, somehow tracked down our parents in Sweden (likely he had just straight up given them their contact information, just in case), and scammed us out of a decent amount of money.
My parents were hard working, we never wanted for anything, and they never let on we were actually not particularly well off and struggled at times. If they were alive, I still don’t know if I would tell them. What was, was. What good is that heartbreak gonna do anybody thirty years after the fact? Anyway, that moment has passed either way, and well, we survived anyway, but damn it stings being the only one knowing this such a long time afterwards. My brother stayed a piece of shit and our remaining family have all gone no-contact with him, so even he doesn’t know, it’s just me.
tomiant@piefed.social 1 week ago
The second time was possibly even more heart-breaking, but at least nobody lost any money. My parents, my father specifically, I mean both of them but this concerns my father- they grew up in a war torn country. My father had three brothers. He was youngest. When he was three years old, war broke up. The big one, number two, and in the worst possible place. He loved his brothers, and the eldest one got drafted, the story is unclear and lost to time, but joined the airforce somewhere abroad. The second one, I can’t even recall, but he disappeared somewhere, sometime, somehow, and none of dad’s family ever heard anything from him again- MIA, basically.
It was a big thing for my father, my grandmother too, she lived with us for years in the new country after the war, and just like in the story above, it’s first after I got up in years and some that I realized what that haunted look was on her face as she zoned out and pulled her fingernails along the armseat of the leather chair that was hers, as the family watched TV together. Dad used to say, “Grama! Stop scritching!”, it was a thing and we all laughed at it because grama scritched. She was thinking of her two lost sons- one of them went into the airforce but was also never heard from again, the other, who knows. Nothing good, probably. But they never knew.
Dad was like her, he just never got over it. He had kind of reconciled the fact that his eldest brother either died fighting, or after the war just relocated somewhere in another country and couldn’t find his family back home again. But the other brother, it just itched him until the day he died, he used to light a candle every Christmas and make the table for one person extra, just so that in case he happened to come knocking, the table would be set for him to sit down and have Christmas dinner with us. We didn’t think much of it, only, again, in my older years did I understand what emotional luggage was being brought out and put on display on that one night every year.
Sorry for being long-winded, but it kind of matters- decades go by, no more grama, parents getting old, and one day there is a letter. Dear so-and-so, it has come to our attention that a lost relative of yours, by the name so-and-so, has been trying to get in touch with you. Disclosed are his personal information, we are reaching out to you to make sure that you are actually related to this person, and would you want to accept his communication? If so, please get back to us by sending $100 to the following address for verification purposes, and he will be passed along your contact information.
My dad called me at work, “Something amazing has happened, get over here straight away after work”. So, of course, I did. By then I was coming up on 40 working IT, I’d been around. I took one look at that letter and just laughed at it, “dad, this is a classic scam. Like, do you mind if I keep this? I have never seen an actual printed Nigerian Prince letter with stamps and all, like, they really went the extra mile with this one!”, and he looked at me with despair, and I will never forgive myself for not being quicker on my feet and realizing the trauma I was casually laughing off, and said, “are you sure? His name is in there, and all, and our name is too, this is clearly real!”.
He wanted so badly for it to be real, my mom sat by him, they both started arguing with me, like, clearly it was real, and that is when I knew for sure that it wasn’t, because they weren’t arguing with me, they were arguing with reality, or god himself, pleading for it to be real. I just shook my head, ever the bitter cold rationalist, “no, this is a very classic trick, and your long lost brother is not trying to contact you”.
I don’t know how I should have handled it, to me it was just another Nigerian scam letter, I was just overcome with the novelty of having a physical copy in my hand, but to my father, and to my mother, it was the one tiny spark of hope they had been waiting for, for decades.
That is the type of sorrow and grief that scammers prey on, and cause. Fuck them all to pieces.
shneancy@lemmy.world 1 week ago
worst place possible to be at the start of WWII? setting up an extra plate at the Christmas table?
your dad was either dedicating this polish tradition to his new intention, or reinvented it from scratch just for him