Bomba wasn\u2019t the first, but she exploded in our lives like a digital grenade. She\u2019s not real, I told my dad \u2013 then in his early seventies. I was in Australia at this time, where I\u2019ve lived for the last 13 years. Physically speaking, he was still in California \u2013 but within himself he was adrift in a rapidly sinking lifeboat, floating in a morass of debris primarily of his own doing. But it must be said before I go further: my dad isn\u2019t the bad guy in this story. Not this time. At times, he was the bad guy in other people\u2019s stories\u2013 but that is another story.<\/p>\n
If she\u2019s not real, he countered, then how is it that we\u2019ve spoken on the phone? That we video-chatted? I\u2019ll admit that threw me. In most catfishing stories the catfish goes to great lengths to avoid video chatting. But my dad being the unreliable source he was, I wasn\u2019t entirely sure he was being truthful about that detail. It was a heartbreaking thing to have to break down for my dad. My dad \u2013 who had once been a handsome, charismatic Lothario with swagger, with game \u2013 now had to be told by both of his daughters that this chic Bomba was 100% not real, not into him, not what or who she says she is. He didn\u2019t believe us.<\/p>\n
Bomba had presented herself, via Facebook, as a widow living in Naples, Florida. She and her late husband had been in the gemstone business, and she was a millionaire. A lonely millionaire at that, looking for love and companionship.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s not real, Dad. I begged him to understand.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019ve seen her bank statements.<\/p>\n
Why would she show you her bank statements?<\/p>\n
Because her money is tied up in Europe, she can\u2019t access it, but she wanted me to know she has it.<\/p>\n
Dad. This is a scam. Have you given her money? Did she ask for money?<\/p>\n
Dad?<\/p>\n
DAD?<\/p>\n
Needless to say, he didn\u2019t believe me.<\/p>\n
The thing about my dad and money is that he had lived a life of great abundance and great scarcity. He\u2019d been born into 1950\u2019s Midwestern high-society, the son of a department store titan, and then \u2013 as many of his cohort did in the sixties and seventies, he \u2018dropped out.\u2019 He spent most of his twenties and early thirties in the Motown music scene \u2013 he was a talented saxophone player \u2013 and in that scene he became addicted to heroin and other substances. He was a low to mid-level drug dealer himself and I am pretty sure there are things I still don\u2019t know about that time.<\/p>\n
What I do know \u2013 because I lived it \u2013 is that, while he was never what you\u2019d call \u2018straight\u2019 \u2013 he did straighten out. He began the long process of untangling himself from heroin after I was born, but he\u2019d never kick his dependence on alcohol and weed \u2013 and that taste for opioids would come back for its pound of flesh. He aimed higher. He got \u201cgood\u201d jobs. He started businesses. He achieved as an athlete, and was the basketball coach at my high school. For a period of time he, and those around him, flourished. He had money. And then he lost it, along with his second marriage, his house in the California mountains, his fancy RV \u2026 and his pride.<\/p>\n
By the time Bomba appeared, he was still nursing the faint hope that he might \u2013 somehow, some way \u2013 get it all back again. Even though by this time he\u2019d burnt so many bridges he was practically an island, and was thoroughly physically incapacitated by the severe scoliosis he\u2019d always outrun as a younger, fitter man. For the pain that the gin couldn\u2019t help, his doctors prescribed OxyContin. We\u2019ll get to that.<\/p>\n
He never admitted to sending Bomba money, but my gut says he did.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d hoped maybe that would be the last scam, but then this happened: my dad called one afternoon to tell me that he was going to buy my husband a better boat. How, I asked? Because I\u2019ve won the lottery, he said. My heart sank.<\/p>\n
Dad. It\u2019s not real.<\/p>\n
He forwarded me the documents he\u2019d been sent \u2013 on Facebook \u2013 by some guy, let\u2019s call him Bob. One was a \u201cwinning certificate\u201d telling him that he\u2019d won US$580m. I pointed out to him that I couldn\u2019t find anything online to verify it \u2013 and plenty of things to alert us to the fact this was a scam. Other things he forwarded me were full of spelling errors and other \u2018tells\u2019. Still, he was intractable and unpersuadable.<\/p>\n
By this time \u2013 the time that my sister and I refer to as the whole lottery thing \u2013 or just the scam \u2013 we knew, to the penny, what my dad had left in the bank \u2013 which was about $50,000. His social security checks were paltry, and he was carefully rationing what he had left on fast-food, cheap gin, weed, and dog food and meds for his golden retriever, Sonny.<\/p>\n
What happened next took place over a period of about six weeks \u2026 maybe more, maybe less \u2013 to be honest, it\u2019s all a trauma-blur.<\/p>\n
Like clockwork, the scammers told my dad that in order to receive his winnings he had to cover the costs of the paperwork, transfer fees, insurance, and other vague items \u2013 that bill was around US$10k, give or take. He paid it.<\/p>\n
Then he was told that because they\u2019d be delivering the $580m dollars in cash to his doorstep, he\u2019d need to cover yet more bank fees, and the cost of the delivery itself, and various other dubious requirements \u2013 to the tune of another $10k or so. He paid that, too.<\/p>\n
When the money didn\u2019t arrive and the scammers went quiet, my dad finally understood he\u2019d been scammed (or so we believed). The FBI got involved, only to tell him that his money was, essentially, unrecoverable. They told him the obvious: don\u2019t give them anything more and stop contact.<\/p>\n
This is where things get really weird and where my dad\u2019s fragmenting mind and broken spirit came into stark relief. Now that my dad knew he\u2019d been scammed he was understandably furious. But because of his own days as a low-level crim who had engaged in his own scams (there\u2019s a weird story about a fake timeshare business he was a part of, and something to do with diamonds) \u2013 he was determined that he\u2019d out-crim the crims.<\/p>\n
Somewhere in this timeline my dad had been hospitalised for the third or fourth time in as many months. We\u2019d recently been told that he had alcohol induced brain atrophy. And there was all the oxy. And the deep well of anger, sorrow and fear.<\/p>\n
Somewhere in this timeline I\u2019d had to call the police multiple times from my home in Australia and send them to check on my dad \u2013 who had, again, threatened suicide.<\/p>\n
Against this backdrop \u2013 my dad resumed communication with the people he knew had already stolen around US$20k from him \u2013 nearly half of all the money he had left in the world \u2013 the people the FBI had verified were, indeed, scammers. Weird, scary things happened. He threatened them. They threatened him. At one point, a plan was made to meet in a park after dark where, apparently, they were going to give him money. To this day I\u2019m unsure as to whether my dad did, indeed, go to a park at night, wander around in his painful gait, confused, ashamed and angry, his pants too big for his dwindling frame \u2013 an image that cuts me to the bone.<\/p>\n
I was so angry with him. He was honest with me about not having cut communication \u2013 and then he relayed the fact that they were, again, asking him for money. It was, essentially, to cover the same kinds of fake costs that he\u2019d already paid. But this time, he was sure they were going to make him whole. So he gave them the rest. All of it. Every last cent.<\/p>\n
In the last week of his life he was texting friends and family asking for $300 to send to the scammers for the petrol they said they needed to drive him his millions.<\/p>\n
In the last days, he was, quite literally, penniless.<\/p>\n
A few days after my dad died the scammers found my sister and me. We typed our outrage into the ether, screamed into the void, told them that they had blood on their hands \u2013 but we know that there was not a single person on the other end of that message. There are whole fleets. My dad was likely talking to multiple people \u2013 many of whom are probably living their own tragedies, in service of traffickers.<\/p>\n
Knowing that our experience wasn\u2019t uncommon was a cold comfort. We knew we weren\u2019t the only adult children grappling with the devastating fallout of financial scams.<\/p>\n
The scammers my dad encountered were not sophisticated, he suspended his own disbelief wilfully. But many scammers are sophisticated \u2013 their scams don\u2019t have spelling errors and inconsistencies. With AI, they are getting harder and harder for people to detect. Especially people who aren\u2019t tech savvy. As their children and loved ones, talking to them about changing their passwords and not clicking on links feels like the epitome of taking a knife to a gun fight.<\/p>\n
Financial scams aren\u2019t the only scams \u2013 I\u2019ve come to see the other \u2018scams\u2019 that, over time, chipped away at my dad. Fox News convinced him that all of his many troubles could be blamed on immigrants, feminism, China \u2026 others. The Maga cult that conned him into thinking that Donald Trump would usher in a new era of success aimed at those who most needed it. The big pharma scam that told my dad that he could manage OxyContin \u2013 even though he\u2019d told them he couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
These days, I\u2019ve come to fear that the entire American project is a scam. The call is no longer only coming from shadowy figures on Facebook, it\u2019s coming from inside the house \u2013 the White House \u2013 with the President himself hawking gold bibles and bizarre coins and EFTs. My dad fell for all of that, too.<\/p>\n
There is a character in my new novel, Mother Tongue, named Eric. Eric has fallen for the Maga scam, for the Fox News scam, the Christian Patriarchy scam \u2026 but he goes down a far, far darker path than my dad did. Creating Eric was cathartic, as was creating his daughter, Jenny \u2013 who, like my sister and me, felt the sting of knowing that her father\u2019s view of the world, of women, of humanity, was so painfully distant from her own \u2013 and that it was a worldview that, if realised to its fullest potential, would cost her dearly. When I first began to draft the character of Eric, I thought I was writing about something rare, drawn from the distinct and precise experiences I\u2019d had with my own dad. By the time I finished, it was clear that I was writing about something many children are grappling with when it comes to their susceptible parents, and my heart breaks for them, too.<\/p>\n
Mother Tongue by Naima Brown (Pan MacMillan, $16.99) is out now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bomba wasn\u2019t the first, but she exploded in our lives like a digital grenade. She\u2019s not real, I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25918,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-25917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}