Legalised Scams

Thulaganyo Jankey | Tuesday November 30, 2021 06:00

If I was in Parliament that self-effacing speaker we all love would have said ‘Where’s ze evdence’. Ze evdence will follow shortly. Just keep reading. The police, the government, Facebook preachers, Facebook idiots, Facebook fiends, banks, cellphone companies, friends and family always warn us about the scams that are out there on a daily basis. In fact, there should be a warning like, ‘It’s scammers season. Just stay indoors’ played over and over like the COVID-19 messages.

Though the emphasis on scams is usually on the illegal ones there are also scams that are legal. Yes, legal. You might not agree with me but think about it. No court will listen to your pathetic cries if you were to litigate though.

The furthest you can get is on the headlines of a local tabloid in less flattering terms like ‘Devious Man Loses Scamming Case’. These scammers are in cahoots with the law basically. If you are drawing a salary you get taxed by government before the money reaches your account. You then go to the shops to get your constitutional monthly groceries where you get to pay tax on the goods you buy. Again! You fuel up your car at the gas station and they charge you tax. Again! School fees, utilities, and on and on it goes. There’s double-dipping. I don’t even know how to describe this type of dipping - multi-dipping maybe. Could that be scamming of some type? It is! Just that the nomenclature is different. Banks are in on it too.

They always warn us about scams in the financial realm. But you sometimes feel they have a forked tongue. What with you being charged for not having money in your account. When you innocently retrieve your money - the one you worked for under a very tough boss - from the bank you also have to pay. If this is not scamming, then I need to enroll in an Identifying Scams for Beginners course. Ordering chicken wings from a chicken outlet results in exactly half of what you have ordered. Apparently in take-away language what passes for one wing in a chicken is actually two wings. So chickens actually have four wings in take-away land. We are being scammed to heaven. Still on the subject of edibles, how come your bag of potato crisps is never full. It almost seems you are buying air with a few crisps thrown in.

Our poor children are victims of a scam. How about the guy who wanted to marry his ex-wife for his (yes, his) money? The lady wised up to the shenanigans and she got to keep the guy’s money, money that had been jackpotted in a bank balance - deflating settlement. He would have pulled off a mother of all scams. In the scam lexicon, there are two types of scams - soft scam and hard scam. Hard scam is like Ivy League in the land of scams and this is where most of the above scams fall.

To be honest, we could well be a Scam Republic. We should as a matter of urgency cajole our political leaders into agitating for a Ministry of Scams to exclusively focus on chicken wings scams, tax scams and all types of scams. It cannot be enough that it is housed as a department under other ministries.

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