From hoax warnings about another tsunami to the ‘standard’ criminals taking money off of dead people, 2005 is opening with a bang. Survivors of the Dec 26th tsunami have been sexually and financially exploited, and if history shows us anything, it’s not about to stop. Children, now orphans, are being kidnapped and sold, while others are being claimed by fake relatives for the relief money. Rescue workers, or at least people posing as rescue workers, have ransacked shops, looted bodies- the list is endless.
I share with you some of the great assholes of the world. None of them are the ‘normal’ criminals that crop up in such a tragedy.
A twenty year-old man was given the URL “tsunamirelief.com” and turned around trying to sell it for $50,000 on eBay. His mother claims he was going to donate the money. Interestingly, the domain’s original owner (a journalist) said she was going to sell it on eBay for $99, but she donated it to our man, in the belief that he represented an international fund-raising effort. When the eBay sale failed to list the requisite charitable donations information, the original owner red flagged it and called in the hounds.
Spam email, originating in Hong Kong, is falsely asking for donations. The scammer claims to be from Oxfam and urges donors to deposit money into a bank account in Cyprus. By all reports, the email is poorly put together, and Oxfam doubts it’ll fool anyone. Yeah, have they seen the idiots on the net?
Even worse are the assholes going door-to-door, asking for money for tsunami relief, claiming to be from the Red Cross. The Red Cross never goes door-to-door, and currently accepts only monetary donations (so that kid who gave her toys is really SOL). Contributions can be made online or by a check made out to “American Red Cross, International Disaster Relief Fund.” Donors are asked to include the phrase “tsunami victims in Asia” in the memo section of the check. Anyone who says otherwise is an asshole.
A forty year-old man pleaded guilty to sending emails to relatives of British people missing following the Tsunami disaster. What kind of emails? Emails purporting to be from the Foreign Office Bureau in Thailand, in which he announced the deaths of missing people. He picked the emails off of the Sky News website, which like many websites, has been publicizing contact information for people, in order to help them find their missing loved ones. Thankfully, this asshole sent all his emails from the same address (ukgovfoffice@aol.com) and was very easy to track down.
FOX TV’s new reality special, “Who’s Your Daddy?” finally airs, and some affiliates yank it the fuck off the air. FOX is the asshole here, for managing to trivialize the emotional experience of finding one’s birth parents, disregarding the love and effort of the woman’s adopted parents, and by in large, marginalizing the adoption process. Way to go, FOX. Okay, so this wasn’t about the tsunami, but geeze…