Sylvia's Journal

A month ago, the fault lines between the have and have-nots were already beginning to show and this produced a highly infectious cocktail: people who do not have a doctor because they don’t have health insurance or who have a job without benefits, gig workers, they all kept working – we will never know how many infections were passed on like that. 

Now a new fault line is emerging, separating the caring from the scammers. I know that there are more caring people than scammers, but the scammers are flooding the stage as there are more opportunities than ever before to separate people from their money. They are pretending to be Medicare and asking for personal information (I had such a call and reported it immediately, though it took me a bit to realize it). They have a range of possibilities to talk anxious, weary and fearful people into doing things that will cost them. 

Scammers also now have a large pool of unemployed people to recruit from and to do their bidding, make the scam calls. I am sure there are now many people who cannot be picky about paid work however unethical.  I don’t think the friendly lady who makes the scam call will partake in the financial windfall if the call is successful.

Scammers are also finding ways to get in the way of the people who care, or worse, right into their faces. Zoom has a series of actions in their COVID-19 resource center to avoid getting ‘zoom-bombed.’  It’s a new term I just learned from my daughter. I witnessed such a Zoom bomb yesterday during a DEVEX webinar with African leaders speaking about matters of importance to funders and members of the American NGO community. Within minutes of the start of the webinar the chat and Q+A boxes were flooded with hateful racist vitriol of an intensity that harkened back to the slavery days. It was so distracting that it kept me from writing questions and comments or reading those from other listeners. Eventually the organizers pushed the infiltrators out, but the text of their writing stayed and each time you opened the chat or Q+A box the words were there, right in front of you.

There were already a lot of angry people in the US who felt left out, I imagine that the ranks of those have swelled, especially when people find out who gets the government checks and who does not. Exceptions to the government handouts are emerging and the process of getting the check are confusing and complicated, especially to people who don’t usually file a tax return because their income is so low. Apparently now, in order to get the check, they need to do so. Imagine how that is going to work.  What a contradiction: government promising swift action!