Monday 8 December 2014

It’s Me! It’s Me!

Japan is home to a very specific type of con-artist. There’s something called ‘Ore Ore’ Fraud (that ore being pronounced not as in a miner striking a seam of metallic rock, but as in an aggressively drunk Spaniard sarcastically celebrating the murder of a cow), which essentially translates as ‘It’s me, it’s me’.

The con works like this: the scamsters aggressively and persistently harangue their victims, often in their own homes, repeating the same simple message – “It’s me! It’s me!” – and through providing that information and nothing else hope that the natural credulity and weak-mindedness of their targets will act to embellish whatever details are necessary to convince them that this ‘me’ is someone who they actually know and appreciate and value. Once this cognitive sleight-of-hand has been achieved, the fraudsters then convince their marks to give them stuff that if they actually thought about it in any meaningful way at all they’d be extremely reluctant to bestow on them.

These people’s prime targets are easily confused elderly people sitting on comfortable nest eggs, and this being Japan there’s no shortage of citizens who fit that description. In many ways this con is only feasible in Japan, if not in concept then in scale. No other country contains quite the right demographic and economic conditions to allow these fraudsters to operate so pervasively and successfully, or with such little push-back or resistance. Needless to say, these con-artists hold their victims in nothing but contempt – assuming all that is necessary to induce people into making significant decisions that could severely impact upon their future prospects is to repeatedly assert the fact that you exist is nothing but contemptuous, I think we could all agree – but they keep at it because sadly, depressingly, it works. Or at least when it fails there is little to fear by way of retribution. And so they persist; constantly, unceasingly, indefatigably pedalling their one-size-fits-all sledgehammer deceit because while it is demonstrably broke, no one really fancy fixing it. Periodic flare-ups are unfathomably tolerated by the populace, and while some more forthright netizens may point out that, hey, this isn’t really something that people should be doing, most persist with their business in a bubble of indifferent tolerance and thus the prospects of anything actually being done about these shysters is disappointingly slim. Ultimately it’s up to individuals, up to you, to protect yourselves as best you can.

This has all been by way of a public service announcement. Stay safe, and don’t have nightmares.



10 comments:

  1. Nothing quite so depressing as election season in Japan. Even worse when the wife gets into a political discussion with her rural family.

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    1. Jeez, I can only imagine. You really lucked out on the timing for your visit, didn't you?

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  2. Very good post. After today, your blog could see you imprisoned for an offence that must remain unspecified, since it's a 'secret'.

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    1. Putting aside the flippancy, the worst part of this is that, despite the fact he himself has painted this as a referendum on the tax hike, you just know that afterwards Abe will claim validates everything else he's done and gives him a mandate for all the other bullshit he wants to do.

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    2. For sure. It's frightening, given how extreme most of his views are. I don't think the Japanese understand how far off his trolley Abe really is. They're gonna wake up with one hell of a hangover.

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  3. I started reading and this made me think of a Kiwi woman who has been duped more than once, sad to say. This last round she squandered the start-up money for a company her husband and son were going to open up. I was actually there when her younger son caught her and the shit hit the fan. I felt guilty for having witnessed the whole ordeal but at the end of the scolding of a lifetime.... she insisted she could get the money back if she would just send 800 more dollars!!!!!

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    1. It's like some sort of gambling addiction, isn't it? "Just one last throw of the dice, that'll see it right. Really this time. No, this time..."

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  4. I don't mean to be a pedant, but why did you choose a photo of a DPJ sound-truck, and not an LDP one? After all, isn't it Abe, with his ¥ printing and inflation fixation that is 'stealing' the value of old Japanese people's savings?

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    1. A fair point to raise, however-
      1. That assumes I hold a level of interest in the topic that extends beyond grabbing the first clear image from a google search, which I don't. And
      2. "We call the Democratic Party of Japan the "opposition" more out of desire than fact. It's populated with refugees from the LDP, and there's negligible ideological daylight between both parties."

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    2. Fair enough, I can't argue with that,

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