I suspect that in the not-too-distant future, when aliens pick over the bones of our failed civilisation, trying to find out what went wrong, they will tag the 2020s as The Scamming Era. Although scamming has been around for a long time, in the form of confidence tricksters, swindlers and fraudsters, etymonline.com tells me that the words ‘scam’ and ‘scammer’ have only been in use since the 1960s. 

Indeed, when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I never heard the word used, nor knew of anyone who had been scammed. Apparently, it may be derived from the British slang word ‘scamp’, which I remember my parents using in an affectionate way to describe a mischievous child, as in “you little scamp”.

I’m not saying that my childhood was a golden age of people behaving well, though it might be tagged The Decent Era by contrast. It’s just that nowadays it seems perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy, to be a successful scammer. This involves exploiting common characteristics such as vanity, gullibility, opportunism, greed and naivety.

Like most humans, I possess these characteristics in some measure and have been subject to potential scams that have almost sucked me in. And though I feel I now know the signs to look out for (unusual email addresses, too-good-to-be-true offers and praise for my ability, especially as a writer), the only way that scammers can succeed is by staying one step ahead of their victim.

The result is that scams are becoming ever more sophisticated and difficult to identify, in the same way that it’s increasingly difficult to tell fake news from real news. Recently I received emails supposedly from commissioning editors of big publishing companies offering representation, which turned out to be impersonations of real editors, the only clue being unusual email addresses. When I did a little research on the topic, I found a website called writersbeware.blog that is flooded with complaints from other writers about similar scams.

I live in Thailand, which has entire scam cities perched on all its borders—with Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. Thousands of victims of scams are drawn to and entrapped in these places and then forced to scam others around the world into romantic or financial disaster.

I don’t consider myself a moralist, but I do feel that for a species to survive and thrive, it needs to show compassion and empathy for others rather than selfishness and lack of consideration. The Buddhist notion of ‘right livelihood’ seems appropriate here, which means earning a living in a way that does not harm oneself or others. 

Of course, an era by definition is a finite period of time, and one day The Scamming Era will end. So, what comes next? Let’s second-guess those aliens and predict that the 2030s, which already many see as the deadline for environmental apocalypse, will be tagged The Self-Destruct Era.