Today we are dealing with scams or rather how the world of scams is evolving in terms of language, the use of technology and also the change of target audience. I have told very often, many times in my long career, about scams on the elderly, which are a painful issue in Italian society because of the number of people involved, the amount of money that is embezzled, and the violence that is perpetrated with much malice, with much wickedness toward often fragile people who are unable to defend themselves both physically and emotionally. Then in Italy there is also the legal issue of the lack of certainty of punishment for these kinds of crimes, so those who commit them are often, I say this brutally, simply out, free, quiet. Then we read instead for a few days, even today there is great attention in the major newspapers, about a somewhat different, more evolved scam.
What is this all about? A fake minister of defense, an important person let’s say, Crosetto, with a voice recorded with artificial intelligence it seems, was phoning gentlemen who were not “poor people,” but important gentlemen of Italian society, (I’ve marked some, Moratti, Della Valle, Beretta, Armani, in short signatures of fashion, entrepreneurship, structured people) people also certainly with large endowments of money. What was the fake Crosetto asking for? He was asking for money to free hostages, journalists who were captured in the various parts of the world, and it seems that this scam was designed on the social emotional wave of the release of our colleague Cecilia Sala, who as you know had been captured in Iran and then freed in a big operation by our government, which also had a backing certainly in the new U.S. President Trump. All very different from the elderly scam, all very refined: many did not fall for it, someone paid out a million, now we are trying to reconstruct where the money went because, let’s say, even in the financial derivations to the scam it was very refined.
It is an evolution of our world, an evolution of the utilization, I say this with some irony, of artificial intelligence, which is being discussed every day in moral and philosophical terms; here in practical moral terms, because it is being used for something it was not meant to be used for. I don’t want to draw any other general conclusions, I say that the best joke was certainly made by a usually very shady, very serious minister, namely the Minister of Economy (thus a government colleague of Crosetto’s) Giorgetti, who said “dear Crosetto at least you could have asked to buy treasury bonds.” Joke I must say funny, I just say, being a great reader of Thomas Hobbs, Homo Omini Lupus, that we have to be careful sometimes of our neighbor, beyond what the Catholic precept says, because sometimes there are really new and very subtle wolves hiding.
See you next time!
The article The Wolves of Scam comes from TheNewyorker.