Hoax-busters are the real victims

I frequently get the feeling that someone is having me on. It`s that kind of century, and IT is that sort of industry.

Scams, hoaxes and spoofs abound, some of them pretty obvious. Every day I get mails telling me I`ve won the lottery, can have fuller, glossier lips, or longer or more inflated appendages.

A few things usually cross my mind when seeing these pathetic attempts to fleece a guy of money he never should have made in the first place, because he`s so stupid.

The first is that you have to be pretty stupid to fall for it. So you`re safe. The second is annoyance. Why waste so many people`s time with this nonsense? It`s clear to anyone that nobody will fall for it, so why can`t we just get over it? Then you realise that sheer annoyance value is probably not the best reward for anyone constructing these scams and sending them out. And you blanch with recognition of the fact that there are some seriously dim people out there.

Think about it. Scams turn even rational people`s brains into mush.

Carel Alberts, technology editor, ITWeb

But that, in my view, is not the point at all of these things. The point is that even you and I fall for them in some way or another.

In a case as simple as a Nigerian 419 scam, falling victim to such e-mails is not confined to actually paying the sender money for the privilege to share in troves of fabulous ill-gotten wealth. It`s far worse. It gets even suspicious types like you and I to behave in puppet-like fashion.

Let me explain: when we come across these fake solicitations in our inboxes, we find it necessary to behave in a certain way. Some people wish to make it clear they distance themselves from anything as asinine as a Nigerian scam, others feel it necessary to inject a bit of irony into things, claiming that look, they`ve won the lottery, isn`t that unbelievable?

And that`s fine, it`s the way most of us cope with annoyance and other, more serious disturbances in our lives. That`s why there are Joburg taxi jokes, blonde jokes, kugel jokes - and I can name a few more. We`d like to think we are above these things, but they cross our line of vision, and wham! They make us act in a certain way - whether it be cracking a joke about it, becoming incensed with the mere sight of it, loudly declaiming it - we`re still the victims. And someone`s having us on and carrying on as ever.

I felt as though someone was having me on recently when I saw a documentary on British bottled water manufacturers. Although the series is quite old, the truth of it is that bottled water remains one of the few growth industries today, which points more to the nature of the human psyche than to the inherent value of things.

I felt kidded, not because I know buying bottled water is a load of crap (although I admit it does taste better), but because of the way it makes me act. Like all good hoax busters, I used to go around denouncing the stupidity of people who buy the stuff, but then I realised: buying bottled water is a fashion statement. It claims something or other about the kind of person who drinks it. And although that in itself is the worst kind of nonsense, I knew I had lost.

As soon as fashion gets involved, one cannot help but be absorbed into the great melting pot of stupidity by its insidious language. Anyone claiming that tap water is just as good as any bottled water, and that he would therefore NEVER drink bottled water, is making as much of a fashion statement as anyone drinking it. It`s like someone resolutely sticking to tweeds in a country that has gone berserk for male eyeliner. He can`t avoid being seen as a twit, ridiculous as that in itself seems.

Jerkz.com is a good place to begin with if you need more insight into the victim status of hoax-busters.

I wanted to scour the site to come up with the best illustration of my viewpoint on this matter, but then came to quite a startling realisation. All the scams listed there are perfect examples, and the most perfect one of all was the very first scam ever, whatever that was.

Think about it. Scams turn even rational people`s brains into mush. A hoax-buster is, through some trick of nature, as much a victim as the people who fall for hoaxes, because they act as intended.

Hoax-busters are as predictable as anything. Whether they construct Web sites like Jerkz.com and angrily respond to every scam victim/forwarder/otherwise challenged person in the world, berating them for clogging networks and wasting people`s time, they are no better off than people scared witless when told of initiation rites on highways. They, in fact, become the most doomed victims of them all.

So if you feel the revulsion encoded into your DNA, if your bile rises, remember you`re just doing as the puppet-master instructs.

It is, at least in part, thanks to you that people like L Ron Hubbard started a religion on a bet, to see how many people would fall for it, and as an ancillary benefit, to watch the enlightened scramble to convince the uninformed that it`s all a scam.

I think I`ll start a scam myself to see how it pans out.