I uploaded the Instagram app on my phone just to see what was there. Since I knew no one on this social network, I clicked to follow almost everyone who came up on my screen. It did not take long before a sleazy underworld began to contact me. At first, I was friendly and cordial. I said, “Hi, how are you? I hope you are doing well.” But quite quickly there were women who would reply or strongly imply that they wanted money for sex. Sometimes, they would be quite explicit about what they did and how much it cost. Other times they were more subtle in their communications. I wasn’t sure what to make of this. I suppose I should have deleted my account, but there was another element on Instagram that intrigued me.

Scammers. Some of their ploys to steal money from me were so obvious that they were comically ridiculous. Did the scammers really think I was that stupid? Often, they would ask me to contact them on WhatsApp. So, I did -- just for the hell of it. Then a phone number would come up from Nigeria or Ghana when I went on WhatsApp. To amuse myself, I would sometimes say my sister was sick so could they send me $1,000 to help with her cancer treatments. One scammer agreed to send me $1,000 but only after I had sent him $2,000.

There were, however, some scammers who were much more clever and believable and did not have phone numbers from Nigeria or Ghana. I also began to believe some of the scammers were using AI to rob their victims. And some of the scams were so sophisticated that it would be almost impossible to detect that it was a scam. I watched a documentary on Netflix called The Tinder Swindler. In this documentary, a good-looking man from Israel went to visit his girlfriend in Sweden accompanied by his former wife and his daughter. Neither were his former wife or his daughter, but this was part of his scam to take the Swedish woman for all her money and credit. It was such an elaborate scheme that I thought I would have fallen for it also. This was how this guy made his living -- by swindling unsuspecting women online. There seemed to be no limit to how far he would go to deceive them, and he was patient and articulate. It disturbed me.

It also convinced me that we live in a new world order -- a cyberpunk world order. As more and more of our life is spent in the digital cyber-universe can anyone be trusted who contacts us online? Worse than this, since so many people online are from the quasi-criminal element, has trust been completely circumvented to a point where this new way of communicating has radically altered the mentality of modern culture to that of a gangster culture: It doesn’t matter how you get the money, just get it? The best thieves benefit from their deception skills and make the most money. Are moral compunctions only for fools in our increasingly nihilistic reality? Is trust a sucker quality? And if we live in a cyberpunk world, are we not required to adopt a cyberpunk mentality in order to prevent ourselves from getting fleeced?

Image: Instagram