I haven’t committed a crime; what I did was fail to comply with the law. – David Dinkins, the Mayor of New York.  

When I was young, we were force-fed homespun aphorisms like “he who laughs last laughs best” to make us feel life had rewards for everyone, even those who persevered until, finally, they, too, succeeded.  

Now that we’re older, we know better. The truth about laughing last is a lot darker and more cynical. We now know that the fellow who laughed last was the guy who thought slowest. 

It stands to reason. There’s always someone several chapattis short of a picnic, the one who usually insists he’s no fool. The insistence alone usually indicated he, too, had his suspicions. 

Laughter is good for you but it’s certainly not the best medicine. Even Dr M knew that was penicillin. 

It’s difficult to maintain a sense of humour these days because a great many people seem anxious to part you from your money. 

In those days, it was usually a wealthy Nigerian prince who’d selected you because he “heard” that you were both good and kind, and he wanted to leave you US$1 million if you would only just fill out a small questionnaire attached to the email, merely to ascertain your bona fides, you understand?

That was about the time you would give up reading the obvious scam, feeling superior because you’d already invested in a wealthy prince from Qatar for half the price. 

Even so, the Nigerian prince trick – “I think therefore I scam” – continues to con the gullible. According to CNBC, those crooks got away with over US$700,000 in 2020. 

Now, it’s by way of phone calls through so-called Macao scams. Indeed, it’s become such a nuisance I’ve stopped taking calls from numbers I don’t recognise.

Even here in squeaky clean Singapore, where I used to answer all calls unless they were What’s-App calls from Malaysia, I have had recorded messages from the Police Force, the Health Ministry, the Home Ministry, and the Income Tax Department. 

The messages were always in perfect English and always seemed reasonable when you heard them in their entirety.

Indeed, they became an enduring source of entertainment during the miserable periods of lockdown during the Covid pandemic. 

Perhaps because street crime is so low in Singapore, scams are flourishing, at least going by anecdotal evidence. As in Malaysia, it typically affects the “heart-landers,” or the middle classes living in public housing. The upsurge in cyber services has also unleashed an equivalent surge in cybercrime mostly targeted at elderly and unwary Internet users. 

It’s spawned a new vocabulary in its wake. To “phish,” for instance, means to trick (an Internet user) into revealing confidential financial information. 

Even reputable institutions can be duped. Last year, hundreds of customers of OCBC Bank in Singapore lost close to S$13 million owing to a phishing scam. Most of the perpetrators have been arrested, including a 19-year-old teenager. 

Even so, it underscores the tradeoff between convenience and security in digital banking. It’s also given a whole new meaning to an ancient Biblical injunction.

“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day: Teach a man to phish and he becomes a Nigerian prince.”

ENDS