Scams are big business these days. According to the ACCC’s Anti-Scam Centre, Australians lost about $2.7 billion to a variety of increasingly sophisticated scams last year.

But despite our best efforts, sometimes the unthinkable happens and we find ourselves paralysed, unsure whether we’re being scammed or if it’s a genuine cry for help from someone we care about.

#117 Avoid a Scam … Or Neglect a Friend?

A few years back, I received a text message that screamed “SCAM”.

It read, ‘Hi Mum, I’ve lost my phone and can’t call. Can you send money through Western Union urgently?’

Now not only did I have no idea how to send money through Western Union, but I have no children. However, I decided to have a bit of fun with the scammer before deleting the supposed cry for help, replying ‘Sure, darling, I’ll put $10,000 into that account we set up to cover any disasters.’

But recently this message arrived via WhatsApp:

It purported to come from a close childhood friend of my sister’s and mine – we’ll call her [T] – who’d left Australia a few days earlier on her first European adventure to visit her brother in France. But [T] had never contacted me via WhatsApp before, and the words didn’t sound like her, so my scam antennae were quivering.

A short while later, she followed up with

‘Is [my sister] connected?’ ‘Is this a good forum to make a joint call?’ It can’t possibly be [T]. She never sounds like this. Who is this stranger?

A quick check of the time difference showed that 10.52AM in Australia was 2.52AM in Paris. [T] is our age. As if she’d be up at that hour.

Someone must have stolen her phone and was now contacting everyone in her address book!

But then a niggling worry set in. What if she really was in trouble and a ‘cascading series of disasters’ had truly befallen her in France? So I sent a message to her husband back home in Victoria, just to reassure myself that the message was safe to ignore.

In a plot twist I didn’t see coming, he replied:

So my sister and I rang [T] in hospital in Ballarat to discover that ‘a series of mishaps’ was an understatement.

The day after her arrival, she’d set out for the Palace of Versailles, but as she was marvelling at the opulence around her, her foot caught a gap in the weathered cobblestones and she fell heavily onto her knee. The deep, rapidly-bleeding wound necessitated a visit to a French hospital where they stitched it together and provided her with painkillers.

Alas, the painkillers were very strong. Too strong for [T] and as she perched on a high stool in the crowded station at Montparnasse, the only seat available as she left Paris for the countryside, she lost consciousness and fell off. Fortunately, her brother was with her by then – to help with the knee injury – but he couldn’t prevent the resultant fracture to her ankle.

Disabled now by two barely-functioning legs she realised that her holiday was ruined. The only solution was to return home to Australia a mere four days after arrival.

However, two long airline flights in a short space of time, complicated by her injuries, led to the almost inevitable DVT on the flight and an immediate admission to hospital to treat both the blood clot and to repair the fracture.

She’s well on the mend now, but sadly has no desire to return to France.

I wish for her sake this had all been a scam.