Just about 90% of the phone calls I get anymore are scams. Those scum – I wish they would scram. It makes me want to scream. I won’t pick up anymore if I don’t recognize where it’s from.
There have always been scammers, of course, scanning for some opportunity for making a fast buck. There have long been unsolicited telephone calls, and before those there were door-to-door salesmen, and travelling medicine shows, and three-card monte tricksters, and so on… But scam calls have not always made up the plain majority of phone calls, and not just because other people don’t call as much.
That seems to be the trend with scams generally. There are just so damn many scams now – and some of them for so much money, right out in the open, involving not simple alley-lurking lowlifes but prominent well-connected persons. Some will say that it’s the same as it ever was. But is that true?
Take this word scam. Four letters, four phonemes, not so different from quite a few other words we have – scum, scalp, scab, scram, scamp, camp, scheme, sham, cram, plus quite a lot more that it rhymes with, as well as others with the same sounds like mask and max. Scam presents itself as a time-honoured (or dishonoured) word with a grand history, woven through the English underworld from time immemorial.
Well. From Time in 1963, anyway. That’s the first citation of it that the Oxford English Dictionary has. Green’s Dictionary of Slang reaches back a bit further in related senses. There’s a 1958 use of it to mean ‘nonsense’, and there’s a 1951 use of skam to mean ‘scheme’. There’s even a Damon Runyon use of scamus in 1944.
But that’s it. That’s as far back as it goes in the print record. We’re not even sure where it’s from. Maybe scamp; maybe Danish skam, which would related it directly to shame and sham. But really, all we can pick up are whispers in the wind.
And, really, its vector into widespread use came in 1980, with an FBI sting operation in which numerous politicians were caught accepting bribes from representatives of a fictitious Arabian company. The operation was called Abscam, from Arab scam (though, after complaints from the American-Arab Relations Committee, the FBI subsequently revised the official etymology to be Abdul scam, from Kambir Abdul Rahman, one of the characters involved). Obviously the word scam was already current within the FBI at the time. And many other people had probably heard it. But its use really caught on after that sting dominated the news for quite a while.
And, alas, use of scams has, with technological advancements, seemed to become epidemic. By coincidence (what else could it be?), as I was writing this, I heard the TV from the other room and it was an episode of PBS’s Frontline called “Scammed,” all about online scams, often being run from compounds in Southeast Asia – where the people working in them have themselves been scammed into going there with the promise of completely different kinds of jobs, then kept there by force and beaten badly if they don’t do the scamming.
It’s not just phone calls, either; it’s social media, through every possible angle. I can tell you that I get incessant game requests on Scrabble from obviously fake people, who you can feel certain are wanting to build a relationship with me so they can gradually get me to fall for a scam. That’s what the scammers do, and they all involve the impression of a real deep and detailed personal history that you can relate to. But it’s not even as deep as the history of this word.
And it all involves links, as Frontline showed, links that can often be followed. For instance, the scam compounds need to connect to the internet, and very often it’s with the aid of Starlink connections, which can often be identified – sort of like how we can identify Abscam as a key point of spread for scam. And many – probably most – of these scams use cryptocurrency, which has the traceability of the blockchain, like an etymology for money.
Well, sort of like it. Just as we can see where the word scam has been used, it’s possible to see where the cryptocurrency changed hands – but not necessarily whose hands it was passing between. And at length, after being passed through many transactions to obscure it, it ends up at a cryptocurrency exchange, where it can be converted to government currency, and there the traceable trail ends – it’s out in the wind, just like scam before its first appearances in print.
Scam came from somewhere; there were people involved. But who, and why, and how? Perhaps we will find out someday. But I wouldn’t stake any money on it.
