What Triggered the Avalanche of Scams and Lies in Our World?

“Yes, it may sound irresponsible of me, but ‘I have no idea’ is the gist of this story. You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at the pond, holding our breath.”

Haruki Murakami, “1Q84″.

Some of my posts are like the Zombies that I keep resurrecting on this blog – I thought they were dead a long time ago, but they simply refuse to die. When I look at the statistics, I see that people keep reading them. One of these posts that refuse to die is If You Believe That You Can Learn a Language in 10 Days You Deserve To Be Ripped Off.

I am assuming that many of the people who came across this post were considering purchasing a CD for 10 dollars to try the “Pimsleur method” for learning a language, and then changed their mind upon reading what I wrote when they realized that the whole thing is a scam. I am glad if I helped to save them hundreds of dollars and a lot of aggravation. This post probably refuses to die because it is a warning also for new potential victims.

The number of scams is growing daily at a healthy rate in the modern world. I think that there were fewer of them around only a few years ago. Well designed scams can be very profitable because thanks to the Internet, such scams can be now launched against huge multitudes of “marks”. We are all marks now, as a huge percentage of the e-mails that we keep receiving every day are scams.

The rest is mostly advertising, which basically means low-level scams. For some reason, 80% of advertising that ends up in my mailbox is in Portuguese, French, or Chinese (in that order). Every day I receive at least a couple of ads in Portuguese for a “vibrador” called Mr. Rabbit. I really have no use for this particular product.

My fax has been also turned over the years from a job delivery device into a dedicated communication device for delivery of scams. For some reason, I can’t bring myself to kill my fax. I probably use it only once or twice a year, but the fax is always on although the only thing it spits out are scams, about twice a week. Offers of incredibly inexpensive vacation packages in places like Mexico, business loans, inexpensive health insurance plans – every single fax is about another scam. There is a number you can call to stop those faxes, but although I called the number three times, they keep coming.

Several agencies in places like Egypt e-mail me every week offers of translation work at incredibly low rates – several thousand words in Japanese or German that they want me to translate for thirty dollars. This too is a scam perpetrated on a cheap customer … who will get his money’s worth. But the jobs attached to these e-mails are real, things like contracts and manuals, so the fact that these agencies exist must mean that they are able to make money in this manner. So this scam must be working, at least on some level.

You can’t trust anything in the current version of our world where something must have gone terribly wrong. At some point something happened to the world that we used to know, and a shift to a different version of the world occurred for some inexplicable reason.

In Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, the shift happened when (or because) a 29 year-old gentle killer of nasty men who do not deserve to live named Aomame got off a taxi hopelessly stuck on a Tokyo highway and climbed down a ladder from an elevated highway to a parallel world.

But what was the event that triggered the avalanche of scams and lies in the world that we live in now, I wonder?

Is there a way to reverse it? Or have we always lived in an empire of scams and bait and switch lies and the only thing that changes is the form of these scams surrounding us everywhere we look?