Scam-a-lama-ding-dong

---

No matter where I live, it seems someone is trying to scam me. Friday night after class I was sitting by the entrance to the Shanghai metro when at precisely 10pm, twenty people rushed the entrance and set out blankets and boxes of stuff for sale.
As I sat marveling at the scene of people trying to make a living, a guy saw me put down my empty water bottle. I saw him coming and gave it to him, asking by the way, how much he gets for each one. He had a huge Santa sack of them on his back. At roughly 2 cents a piece, he probably had $5 worth. Enough to get by on.
Not long after, a young Chinese woman came and sat next to me. In English, she asked me if I could help her. She’d come to Shanghai from some rural village where she was a teacher, but she thought her prospects would be better here. Only they weren’t. She was broke. Could I give her money for some food.
I have to say I absolutely didn’t believe her for a minute, but I absolutely wanted to. So I started asking questions about her family, her job, all that stuff. Mostly I was just practicing Chinese. For me it was as though a Chinese teacher had sat down next to me. In about ten minutes, I gave her 20 kuai, about $2.50.
Then she upped the ante.
Thanks, she said, but you know, times are tough. She has no place to stay either. For another 50 she could get a room in a place near the Railroad station. I don’t want to the cause of this woman sleeping on the streets and all that might entail, so I asked her for the 20 back, and I gave her a 50. About $6.
Thanks, she said, but now she was still going to be hungry. Yeah, well, I thought, tough choice, eh? We kept talking. She said her father was coming to town on the next day, if I gave her 100 kuai, she would get the money from him and pay me back.
Oh really? In fact, they would take me to dinner as a token of her gratitude. I gave her my business card and said, “You’re not telling me the truth at all,” which she pretended to not understand. Somehow, her English was limited mostly to that one line she used as an opener. She kept smiling. And we kept talking. For at least another 15 minutes. And by then she’d exchanged the 50 I gave her for the 100 I’d offered. I’m thinking all the while that of course she is scamming me. What started as some food money has now grown to nearly twice the average daily salary. She was doing well. But I was getting a convenient Chinese lesson. She was being patient at explaining things and letting me re-explain them to make sure I understood her. Now that we were up to 100, she told me that because I was so kind, she’d actually give me 200 the next time we meet.
That about broke my patience. Of course I knew I was being a rube, but telling me she’d double my money was just downright patronizing. But at that point, she already had 100 kuai, about $12.
That’s when I started considering options, like inviting her to stay at my house and buying her dinner. Could I somehow turn the tables on her? I was wishing I had a counterfeit 100 that sometimes people get, so I could give her that one too. Or, maybe I could take down her ID number and threaten to turn her into the cops. But that would just be mean. Instead, I tried to let it go and entered the subway. She followed me, telling me she needed to get to the train station.
Good, I said, let’s take the subway. Only the subway wasn’t running that direction, she pointed out, it was down for repairs.
Could I give her 20 kuai to take a taxi?
Oh, puh-leeze. Now she was insulting me. I turned my back and crossed the turnstile.
Last I saw of her, she was outside the metro entry gate, waving as I left. I have to believe we connected. We shared some laughs. We are both the fifth of five kids. And I am an easy mark and she was saying goodbye to her sugar daddy. Who wouldn’t smile and wave and put on one more good lie, just to keep up appearances.

The thing about all this is that I haven’t told you yet, is that when I was in Hangzhou, I had a similar experience. I was walking home one night and a guy and his girlfriend approached me. New to town, looking for work, broke, could I help. The 20 became 50 and that became 100.

The thing of it is, it is plausible. People do come from the country to try and make it here.
And there aren’t enough jobs, that’s why people beg and search trashcans for water bottles. And there are bigger scams, too. The very day I was had, I read in the NY Times about a riot that broke out at a college. This school was set up under a new scheme to serve the overflow of students seeking wealth through gaining University degrees. Competition is fierce at the top institutes and these students didn’t qualify for the prestigious school where tuition is $500 a year. Instead, then enrolled in an affiliated school that cost $2500 a year but promised to give them a degree that looked just like a degree from the prestigious ‘mother-school.’ It was a scam and everyone knew it. Only between when the students enrolled and the diplomas were issued, the government changed the rules, and the diplomas contained no mention of the blue-chip college whose name would nearly guarantee a job. “Hey,’ the students said, “We paid extra for the name and you didn’t deliver!” They’d been scammed and were pissed so out of the window came pouring all manner of beer bottles and major appliances.

The world is rife with that kind of thing and it’s not like I haven’t done a few things to get by. I cheated on high school Spanish tests. At the time, I couldn’t see the point of learning a foreign language I was ‘never’ going to use.

And there was that time I was 12 and went around the neighborhood doing “Trick or Treat for UNICEF.” I collected about a dollar that day and well, the starving children’s fund never saw any of that. Not that I set out to rip off people, but I was just lazy about turning in such a small amount of dough.

This all fits in with some philosophy I have been reading from Geshe Michael Roach, a Buddhist monk who went to New York and while knowing nothing about diamonds, got into the business with a couple partners and parlayed $50,000 into a multimillion dollar diamond business. He wrote a book called “The Diamond Cutter,” it’s an English language explanation of the ancient Tibetan Diamond Sutra. It mixes Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and the Dalai Lama. It offers us a surefire way to get rich slow. The premise is one of emptiness. That is, every experience is neutral but that our thoughts and beliefs fill the emptiness. It helps explain why one person might bounce back from a tough experience while another person folds. A second premise is that our thoughts are like planting seeds. Every thought we have gets planted in the mind and eventually ripens. And the longer the thought sits in the fertile soil of the subconscious, the bigger the fruit it will bear. It could take days, years or even lifetimes. So the caution is since you have no choice but to plant seeds, make sure they are the kind that bear fruits of honesty, kindness, compassion and love.

As scams go, the one I bought into on Friday wasn’t so bad. What’s $12 to me? The employees and pensioners at Enron, Adelphia, Worldcom, Tyco all got stung much worse. So a $12 loss is a pretty easy one to bear especially if I can burn off a little of the karma I created from cheating UNICEF. (Could my dollar there perhaps helped the very agency that may have helped the woman who was now ripping me off? Ya just can’t say.) And who knows, maybe this Chinese woman will take my money and build herself a legitimate business. Besides, some scams we just can’t avoid. What choice did voters in Ohio have in 2004? To use President Bush’s words, “someone was gaming the system.” Then there’s all the money I have in the stock market, let’s not even go there. But I have to say, having been taken twice by the food scam, I don’t think I will fall for it again. Those who know history have at least a chance of not repeating it. Many of us have seen that strategy work. It’s why so many people didn’t for a minute buy that WMD scam that we now call the occupation of Iraq.

---

Comments

[Karen Wilhelm]

Value
In what we call "lean" business thinking, we are supposed to produce "value" that the customer is willing to pay for. I think John did a good job getting his $12 worth - letting a girl feel like she's getting pretty good at her job, a meditation on stealing and cheating, a chance to redeem himself for his $1 he owed UNICEF, a good story and a blog post. As a customer, he might not want to spend $12 every day pretending to be gullible, but it wasn't a bad deal today. And at the same time, there's the consciousness that we are extraordinarily priveleged to have access to money, education and friends who can help us. I was in downtown Detroit yesterday at the baseball game - I try to go to one at least every 30 years - and saw a variety of methods for pan handling. My thought every so often is to buy a bunch of McDonalds coupons and give those instead of cash. Would the person use it for food? Sell it to someone else? Throw it back in my face? Sad to say, I just walked by as though I couldn't even see them there. So John - thanks for getting us another look inside the world. (with love from your big sis)