What’s Trending: Go Ahead And Scam The Government

0:00it is time now for what's trending made possible by locally owned dynamic electric with experienced electricians providing safe and reliable repairs installation and troubleshooting online at dynamic-electric.com. Victor Lewis back in the studio. Good morning. How are you? Pretty good. Today's trend is going to be weird. So just be ready for that. Yeah. Yeah. Get weird people. All right. So the Wall Street Journal had a joint piece by Matthew Luxmore and Milan Cerny talking about specifically an emerging scam in Russia, but I hesitate to call it a scam. Scam is deployed. And I don't think that's 100% accurate here. The scam, quote, quote, in question is newly enlisted soldiers in the army bound for conflicts that Russia has involved in getting married to strangers, sort of rough shot, shotgun, courthouse weddings. And that new bride continues living wherever she was before they get shipped off to war. And the not unlikely event that that soldier dies on a bloody front line somewhere. The death payout to

1:02the next of kin is roughly equivalent to USD $200,000, which is about 20 times the annual average Russian salary. Right. And I don't know how much I feel like this is a scam. My welfare queen alarm bells started going off a little bit here because I mean, why wouldn't you just say, hey, friend of mine, I'm going to go do this. Why don't we get married? And then at least something good happens if something really bad happens to me. Yeah. That doesn't seem like a scam. I mean, on the one hand, yeah, it's a scam. On the other hand, look, when you're living in an oppressive regime that doesn't care about you and uses you as cannon fodder for their own personal gain and has some sort of awful death payout. Go ahead and scam the government, I say. That's sort of how I feel. I mean, like, let me, let me ask you the lesser version of the exact same

2:04question, how bad does our government have to get before you start cheating on your taxes? You don't have to answer that into a live microphone, but it's kind of the same thing, right? It really is. It really is. And I ran across some materials from the Russian government labeling the perpetrators of this, this black widows, which that's delightful, whatever. But then what I'm grateful for from this particular Wall Street Journal article is that it breaks this down in a very effective way about what's going on, why it's a scam, why it might not be a scam. And then it hits you at the real gut punch at the end, where it's just like, you know, if you've ever thought about this for more than five minutes, especially as an American in your own hedge maze of weird financial institutions, surely you had the thought that some banking institution somewhere figure out that brokering this kind of arrangement for a small upfront payment or a finder's fee could be something that happens. Now I understand why the Wall Street Journal is getting involved

3:05reporting on this. Turns out several firms have set up exactly the deer reader of the Wall Street Journal who I assume owns a bank. You can get it on this scam too. And it looks like the main bank getting involved in this is called a Russian organized crime. And there is a whole lot of not great recruitment schemes are using that very liberally here recruitment schemes for this to get taken advantage of all in all, it's a fascinating situation. Okay, that's the scam. Like that's okay. That's the scam. Here's the thing. And I'm not going to, I'm not going to use the metaphor that I have in my head, but I've had similar conversations about like other concepts that we think of as being like universally bad. Like the word scam we hear and we automatically like attach negativity to that. Like, oh, if it's a scam, it's bad. Maybe there are good scams. Maybe there are opportunities to like skirt around the rules and take advantage of people for the

4:07purpose of good. Maybe. I don't know if we can have quite a lot of good scams. Maybe that's sincerely. And I definitely came out of this screw with the Russian government. I think is an okay justification for a scam. I definitely came out of this in the same way that I come out feeling. Of course, it is a universal good for you to recycle your individual waste as much as possible, reduce, reuse recycle in that order. Of course, that's good. But you're not necessarily helping anything real at scale. You're just doing your part. However small that may be. The unfortunate reality is that all of our parts are relatively small. It simply is what it is. I don't like the specific targeting of these black widows being the person, the people who fingers are getting pointed at as you're scamming. No, organized crime is scamming. Financial and these institutions are scared. That's the scam. Yeah. The also wears the scam. I'm married. Here's my marriage certificate. My poor husband has passed away at the war. I have all of these like civil war

5:08era style letters like dear Valentina. I fear for my safety at the front. Give me my money. It's not a scam. It's all a jit. You know, sometimes I worry about my proclivity for bits because I feel like that is entirely something I would start doing. I would be sending letters every day long-winded, overwrought romantic letters to someone that, you know, I was just friends with and childhood.