We Could Be Good Friends

Thoughts on my brief conversation with a scammer

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“Here’s my picture. Did you see it?” 

She was a young woman, probably early to mid-twenties, wearing a charcoal blazer with white lapels and oversized buttons. Brown hair, smooth skin; a different recipient might have noticed her cleavage before her outfit. She was making a kissy face, knuckles held cutesily to her cheeks. It was hard to believe an image like this was of a real person somewhere out there, that such pictures weren’t generated exclusively for deception.

“I’m Jenny,” she went on. Her texts were green, so they weren’t from an iPhone. “It was nice meeting you on the dating site. Can we chat if you are free?”

Oh, Jenny.

It doesn’t take a particularly savvy person to identify scam texts, scam calls, or scam emails. The average citizen is inundated with them. Perhaps it’s this ubiquity that’s made people apathetic about them. Most people, it seems, have made peace with the idea that on any given day there will be multiple requests for communication that are to be ignored entirely. 

Anyone who would fall for antics like Jenny’s, meanwhile, is assumed to be unusually gullible, or of a generation where the reflex to distrust unknown numbers was never quite developed. Indeed, these rackets prey on the incredibly earnest, the elderly, the lonely. But for all that, their insidiousness rarely inspires outrage. Much like the calls themselves, the situation is more or less ignored, considered an ambient irritation, like unpleasant weather.  

I understand this mindset as someone who regularly wards off scams like a horse shooing away flies with a lazy flick of its tail. They would never work on me, so they don’t really matter. And anyway, to take any one of these missives seriously is how you get duped in the first place. As is often the case in capitalism, sincerity of any kind is a liability and better left off the table.

But if I were to sit and think about it, I might come up with some questions for myself: Do you not think you will get old one day? That your instincts might at some point fall out of lockstep with the sophistication of the scammers, leaving you vulnerable? How far away are you, really, from becoming a mark? Didn’t you fall for the AI-generated image of Pope Francis in a puffer coat? Remember the AI-generated papal puffer, you rube? 

These are unpleasant thoughts, so they are sent to the spam folder. I figure I can cross that bridge when it comes. This ignores the fact that, in my recent past, I’d found myself very nearly ensnared in one or two of these little traps. 

There was, for example, the rather convincing email from UPS, sent on a day when I had been expecting packages. It told me I needed to specify my apartment number in my address, and that if I were to pay a small fee while I was at it, the packages could be sent more quickly. It was very much in my character to neglect to add a small piece of vital information. I’d opened that email and clicked through to the website before realizing every link on it asked for my PayPal information.

Upon realizing what was happening, I closed out of the window, feeling embarrassed, but also throwing my hands up as if to say, Ahhh, ya got me! There was little else to do. I couldn’t imagine any formal recourse. I’d seen a few videos on YouTube of vigilantes getting revenge on scammers, using elaborate technology setups to find the location of the call center, the scammers’ nest, or deploying clever mind games to get the crook to admit what they were up to. I didn’t have time for anything like that. I had work to do. Genuine emails to send. 

This is all to say, Jenny, that we live in a scam society where grifting is the norm, and the way we’ve decided to deal with it is the same way we decide to deal with most things—survival of the fittest. If you get fooled, then you’re a fool. 

However…

I was feeling foolish that day. I had just returned from a nightmarish, month-long trip to Texas wherein my romantic relationship of a year and a half had fallen apart. I’d thought, up until then, that I was going to move from Brooklyn to Texas, and my prevailing sentiment upon landing in New York was the feeling that I would have to rebuild my life a bit, go back to the drawing board. (An ad in the yellow cab from the airport asked, Do you have what it takes to make it in New York?, which felt rather pointed, and so I nodded. You will see I have a habit of awkwardly inserting humanity into such material). 

I was also in those days incredibly needy. I have a robust ecosystem of friendship in my life, but there are nonetheless gaps in communication where silence sets in and presents itself as a statement on how infrequently people consider me in their daily lives. I was also, whether I wanted to admit it or not, running little tests on my relationships. Who was there for me? Who wasn’t?

It was during one of these miserable stretches of silence that Jenny texted me the picture of a woman making a kissy face. I’d received dozens of texts like these before, and aside from a morbid curiosity about what awaited suckers who took the bait, they didn’t inspire much in me. But this day was different, and in my frustration I decided to reply.

“Jenny. I am a homosexual. This won’t work on me.”

I knew immediately upon sending it that I’d entered a lose-lose situation. What was the best-case scenario here? An impassioned fight with a robot? Silence? Minutes went by. I thought it funny that even scammers were leaving me hanging. Then, a response. “It’s not a problem,” she said. “We can be good friends.”

This deflated me, reminding me a bit of the accidental poetry that spam bots speaking broken English sometimes created. We can be good friends. It stung. I felt like I did need a good friend. This was, of course, all a bit ridiculous. But the ridiculousness only irritated me further. I had let a robot, or what might as well be a robot, make me feel something. I decided on revenge. I would get rid of all the robots in my life. I would tell them to thank Jenny before unplugging them.

---

I have what I consider to be an unorthodox relationship with the junk mail in my inbox. It takes a lot for me to unsubscribe from a business’ mailing list. I in fact take small pleasure in receiving them from certain establishments, even if I never actually open them. The coffee shop I visited once in Maine on a sunny, salty afternoon with friends years ago reminds me that it is still in operation, awaiting my return. The hotel I stayed at in Paris is, likewise, missing me today.

Sure, this might make sense when it comes to coffee shops and hotels visited during lovely little trips. It makes a bit less sense doing this for “most restaurants” and “several clothing stores.” But I find an odd sense of comfort in being reminded that things I saw once a long time ago still exist. I am, in the end, a romantic, impractical person governed by emotional impulse. In other words, I am the perfect consumer. Anyone I have ever bought something from is my friend, in a way.

But after my interaction with Jenny, which felt nearly and uncomfortably human, I decided everything she represented was my enemy. I was tired of these constant assaults on my attention. It wasn’t that I thought marketing emails were precisely the same thing as strangers trying to dupe me into giving them my credit card number (though, that is sort of “marketing”). It was that I was tired of these non-people using emotional language in pseudo-conversations with me. 

A restaurant could not miss me. A clothing store was not actually interested in what kind of summer I was going to have. Jenny and I were not going to be good friends. I had let Jenny and her friends get away with bugging me for too long. I declared war against spam, against robocalls, against phishing schemes and corporate newsletters alike, against all these digital ghosts trying to leech my energy. Once I became mindful of them, I realized they were absolutely everywhere. I was in a veritable haunted house.

During this time, I manually unsubscribed from dozens of mailing lists that I’d never signed up for. It seems I had been automatically added by having used my credit card there once. I held special contempt for any business that required more than one step for unsubscribing. The GAP, for example, asked if I was really sure, if I wouldn’t rather take a quick break. A quick break! What are we, gay men in an open relationship? Still others prompted me to “update my email preferences,” as if it was my preference to be bothered for the rest of my natural life about crewnecks. I also found that sometimes unsubscribing did nothing at all.

But at least the emails had options. The calls were more difficult, if not outright impossible to deal with. For years now, I’ve ignored multiple calls a week from a business claiming to be in the publishing world. “We work with many publishers,” the caller reliably says, always a different person, “and I’m excited to say we have decided to make an offer on your book.” My first book has been out for two years now, published by Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint. It’s good that I am armed with this information because, before I was published, when I was desperate to get my foot in the door, such a call might actually do some damage, at least mentally. 

I knew exactly how these people had gotten my contact information. In college, I’d googled “how to get an agent,” which had led me to a guide that looked official, but wasn’t. It suggested that I put my work out there on a website that agents sometimes checked. I did so, and ever since then, I’ve received these calls. Eternal punishment for a brief lapse in judgment. 

The worst part of this condition (I say “condition” because it does feel like a rash with occasional flare-ups) is that the calls will sometimes appear as if they are coming from my hometown. It happened once, and only once, that I answered one of these calls instead of sending them straight to my voicemail, and it ended up being my grandfather, whose situation with phones is constantly shifting. This was years ago. He was trying to get ahold of my mom. “Did you change your number?” I asked. He had. It was a new phone.

Right now, with my grandfather in failing health, these calls upset me. They make me mad. Could it be him? A hospital, or some urgent place like that? These are things I shouldn’t be thinking about. I have a phone in the first place so people can reach me. I’m angry that my moment of vulnerability as a college student trying to find my way into the publishing world has resulted in this constant stream of scam calls years later. “Leave me alone!” I shouted at the last person from this operation to call me, hanging up, then feeling a bit silly. Always a bit silly, dealing with these things with any degree of emotion.

There is an unnerving, attendant helplessness to our current scamdemic. I don’t doubt there are programs, or little tips and tricks that would mitigate the volume of calls and emails. But the rot continues, and it’s getting worse, the scammers constantly adapting and growing in sophistication. It’s a multi-billion dollar enterprise that’s impacting people’s mental health, and vulnerable populations’ wallets. I don’t even want to think about how they’ll take advantage of AI.

Even still, the most depressing thing about all this, to me, goes beyond individual crooks. It’s beyond junk mail, and scam calls, and phishing plots in aggregate. The most depressing thing to me is that we live under economic conditions where cynicism is consistently rewarded, and where to be earnest is to leave yourself wide open for exploitation. 

The thriving fraud industry isn’t a blight on corporatism. It’s an articulation of it, one with hallmarks recognizable in other, more respectable commercial enterprises. The reliance on emotional language in an increasingly lonely, isolated world, the anthropomorphizing of nonhuman entities to give corporations a human face and a human voice, something that could be your friend, all in the name of separating people from their dollars. There’s a reason I lumped Jenny in with established businesses. 

The governing principles of scamming hold true for the market in general. The more desperate someone is, the more easily exploited they are. Vulnerability, be it due to illness or old age or poverty, is a lucrative business opportunity. People who want to make an honest living are rewarded with a grueling slog through a labyrinthine system that would replace them with robots if it could and long hours that cannibalize their leisure time all so they can more optimally generate profits for a Big Man they will probably never meet, a person born into wealth who was clever and evil enough to rig the game. 

Isn’t that kind of “most of it?” The ultra wealthy make their billions off the misery of the rest of the population, and shrewd entrepreneurs set up shop selling balms to make it tolerable. If we’re in hell, then there’s money to be made in making it a livable hell, a slightly customizable hell, a hell where you can choose the color of your crate. Rose gold! 

But I’m getting emotional again. The point is, in our present economic conditions, there is no downside to corporations maximizing our desperation and minimizing our attention spans. Human attention is, after all, the most precious resource at our disposal. To utilize it effectively and collectively is to move mountains. We could change the very nature of our world with it overnight. Its value has only deepened as daily demands upon it increase. The constant, never-ending assault on it ought to outrage us. But it doesn’t, really. It’s just sort of how things are.

Do I think Jenny and scammers like her are in league with, say, Elon Musk? The proliferation of bots on Twitter supports the theory, but I’m not so conspiratorial in my thinking. It’s not that scammers are consciously in service of The Man. They are more akin to unsexy pirates, skirting morality and the law to pillage and pilfer, while CEOs prefer more official channels to conduct their ransacking. 

No, I see these scammers more as the flies crowding the turd. Their constant, irritating buzzing is something most of us have over time learned to tune out. But if you do choose to listen, if you choose to actually read the text or accept the phone call, you’ll hear something sad—a voice, claiming it knows you from somewhere, asking to be friends before asking for your money. 

Jenny and I, needless to say, never spoke again.