Man Man Zou

This morning I was woken up by a man on the phone freaking out- crying, screaming, and just plain going nuts. All I did was entertain myself by listening for a few seconds, then hung up. Why? Because this was a telephone scam. How do I know? Because it’s not the first time I got a phone call from a guy pouring out all his problems to me. Some guy phoned my cell (a different number than today’s call) a few weeks ago bawling. That time, I thought it was funny because I imagined that he was trying to phone his estranged girlfriend and dialed the wrong number instead. I didn’t try to console him though, I just listened for a minute or so, passed the phone around to the people I was with so they could listen, then hung up.

Phone scams are very common here. I’m not sure how people fall for the trap anymore, since everyone knows about them. In fact, I’ve had several Taiwanese people freak out on me because they thought I was a telephone scam artist.

My boss at my cram school pays me for a thing she calls ‘telephone teaching’. Once a week, for an hour and a half, I phone up my students and have a 5 minute conversation with them. I ask them questions using some of the recent material we’ve covered. So this means that I have to phone up Taiwanese households and speak Chinese with them (though I always try English first, because that’s what my boss wants me to do). After a year of doing this, most families had caught on to what’s going on when some crazy English-speaking person phones them. But once in a while I get reamed out by a granny or grandpa on the phone, and it’s because they think that I’m a telephone scammer. When I switch to Chinese, and explain that I’m the English teacher and that I want to do telephone teaching, they yell at me and then hang up. I phone back and they answer by yelling at me again, and then hang up. So I have to get the secretary to phone them, and then they have a 5-minute conversation (in Taiwanese) about how I’m not actually a scam artist.

Text message scams on cellphones are also very common here. I often get text messages in Chinese asking for money for things. It seems just as common as email spam, I don’t know how people can fall for that anymore!