Cynicism Vs. Compassion on the Internet

Recently, an excellent health blog that I follow, www.Everythinghealth.com, posted an article asking for financial assistance for a 13-year old Armenian girl who requires a very serious operation to remove ovarian tumors. The blogger is a physician that I respect and have consistently found her blog to be an excellent source of credible medical information and advice, however, this recent article caused me some concern.

In general, I am always suspect of pleas for money that arrive over the internet. A few years back, I began to explore the many “Nigerian Scams” that I would receive via the various email accounts that I had. This exploration lead me to develop some vary simple research techniques that quickly identified whether a particular message was a scam. Unfortunately, these same techniques don’t seem to yield the same degree of certainty about whether the messages are not a scam.

And therein lies the foundations of my cynicism regarding internet pleas for money.
The problem, of course, is worldwide and affects anyone with a valid email address. Most of the pleas come in the form of non-specific spam messages which most of us have come to recognize. The basic components of a “Nigerian” scam seem to include:
• A long, detailed message body
• Semi personalized greetings
• A reputable sounding author
• A detailed explanation about a unique financial predicament that requires the recipient to make certain international financial arrangements, which, if performed properly, will result in the recipient receiving a large sum of money.

“Non-Nigerian” variations on this theme can also include:
• A desperate description of a dire (medical, political) situation facing the author or author’s family
• Specific details that relate to the recipient’s situation (child of similar age, recent news topic, shared family name)
• Specific dollar amounts required
• Detailed explanation as to why the author is required to ask for help via the internet

Many of these messages are truly heart-wrenching, and easily understandable given most of our knowledge of the various terrible world and personal situations facing us. My cynicism grows out of the fact that these messages specifically target that most precious of human qualities, compassion, and twists it into a completely self-serving ploy to separate well-meaning people from their money.

Of course, in the pure Nigerian Scam, the recipient’s motive is less altruistic, as these scams rely on another human quality, greed, as their primary motivator.
The non-Nigerian scams rely upon the recipient’s underlying guilt at his/her own financial comfort and relative success, compared to the poverty that exists throughout a great deal of the world. This guilt is mixed with a need for meaning and purpose that haunts many of us in the Western World. There is a feeling that our success and comfort has separated us from true substance and moral value, so donating some of our wealth to support those less fortunate (and seemingly more desperate) than ourselves seems to be a logical way of re-attaining our compassionate soul.

The internet is a powerful vehicle for reaching literally millions of people quickly and effectively. Note how effectively President Obama leveraged the power of the internet to fund his campaign and organize his followers. This same power has long been used for various other types of fund raising for any number of excellent and worthy causes. There are so many convenient payment and verification tools now available on the internet that online fund-raising is almost painless and certainly immediate.

So how can one weigh the value that the internet can provide for worthy causes and individuals against the harm that unscrupulous individuals and organizations cause to human spirit and faith by using our own compassion against us? This is a question that I struggle with often, especially when presented with, what appears to be, a genuine plea for help that any desperate parent might resort to in order to save their child.
In a future blog, I will share some tips I have learned about quickly identifying internet scams using simple internet search tools and websites. In the mean time, I welcome your comments on this topic.