I like to think of myself as an honest man, who would make a very poor crook. My mother made it a point to drill into me and my siblings that lying and taking things that we shouldn’t take was not only criminal but morally wrong.
She took great pride in the fact that on her side of the family, people, particularly her father, were “incorruptible.” She also stressed that it wasn’t her side of the family that was rich in moral fibre. She made the point of drilling it into me that my father’s family were also decent people.
Yet, despite the valiant efforts of my parents to keep away from the nasties in life, I’ve somehow run into more than my fair share of nasty people or as they say – the people who make a living exploiting the weaknesses in others.
Scams can take many forms. You could say that the China girls in Geylang, Singapore’s Red-Light district are running a scam, especially the ones who pick up an old man and somehow persuade him to spend his entire pension on them. You could also say that the street sellers trying to flog you second-hand goods or the old people selling you tissue paper off the street is running a scam.
To a certain extent, there might be some truth in the sense that these people are not working in conventional jobs. However, in many cases, you got to salute these people who do what they do, and their existence is in actual fact a blight on society as a whole rather than on the individuals doing the task.
If you look at whom the…