It seems every other day I get an email from one of my banks telling me how to watch out for scams. We're pretty tech savvy - I imagine many people on Hive are - but internet scammers are constantly finding new ways to thieve. The general reaction to them is visceral and violent - chop off their fingers! - but like any thieves, one must look at the root cause of why they're scamming, and treat them like any other thief. It's only because we spend so much time in online spaces open to opportunists that we get so upset about it, and oftimes it's our own damn fault because we didn't do the internet version of locking the damn front door., getting a security system, and doing our due checks.

Like with any justice system where you are deciding whether to hang, draw and quarter the Prince of Darkness hiding behind a computer screen, you gotta really think about the bigger picture.

^{Sometimes it's really, really hard to find an appropriate orginal image to match your content. Imagine this building full of scammers gleefully counting your hard earned money.}

They're not always loners running phishing scams or Gumtree quick dollar making ventures, but they can be part of organised groups, sometimes indentured slaves in call centres with targets to be met. Some are victims of trafficking themselves, forced into scam compounds across Southeast Asia. And like many thieves, they end up scamming because they're financially desperate, or they are in social networks where online fraud is normalised as a legit career path where easy money is hunted down.

Whatever the reason, it's easy to see them as assholes. But I still fail to see how people get scammed - there's so much media out about it these days that sometimes I think it's the victim's own bloody fault.

Okay, maybe I'm being a bit harsh here. We've been victims of a scam ourselve - Jamie was so desperate for Defender doors that he put an ad out for them on GumTree, and this absolute prick called William - seriously, we even had a copy of his licence - said he had some, and he'd send them down from Queensland - he wanted $300, which was a bargain, and we sent that off. Next thing he's messaging from the courier, wanting another $200 as it was more expensive to ship than he thought. As soon as Jamie sent the money I knew it was a scam. Thing is, the cops don't do anything for amounts under $500, and as far as he was concerned, come and get him - all he'd do was say we had picked them up and we were lying. We learnt our lesson, and though we coulda killed the guy, it was our desperation that led us to not exercise caution. Lesson learnt. I don't even blame the guy anymore. I think people are a lot more careful these days.

And there's bigger scams too, stealing hundreds of thousands not just from 80 year old Aunt Mabel but intelligent people who just didn't think when they clicked on the link. The ones that play on people's loneliness, their isolation, their vulnerability. Their desperation to be loved.

You wonder how they sleep at night.

There's definitely a big moral failure on their part - the inability to feel for the person that they're bringing to ruin.

Perhaps that's the bigger crime, and the one we get more upset about. It's not just that Aunt Mabel lost $250,000, it's that she's an old, vulnerable woman who worked her whole life for that money that she was going to buy a unit by the sea that she'd saved her entire life for by working in a supermarket, and that she'd only just lost her husband of 67 years.

So yeah. Hang, draw, and quarter the assholes. They probably do deserve it.