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.
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