What we agree to put up with

A message lands on a retired man's phone in Sharjah. His account will be suspended within the hour, it says, unless he confirms his details at the link below. The logo looks right. The tone is urgent and polite.

He nearly taps it. Plenty of people do.

None of this is a prank any more. Behind that message sits an operation with staff, targets and a cost for every person it catches. Deceiving people has become an industry, and like any industry it gets better at its work each year. The wording improves. The timing improves. The fake investment circle, the miracle cure, the course that promises easy wealth by the end of the summer, all of them are tested and refined like any other product.

The usual answer is that the buyer should be careful. That is true, and it is not enough. It puts the whole weight on the man holding the phone, as if the only thing that ever goes wrong is his attention.

There is a second answer, and it belongs to everyone else. A trick being profitable does not make it a career anyone is owed. Finding a gap in the rules does not make it respectable. We decide who gets our respect, our custom, our introductions and our applause, and someone who earns a living by deceiving people does not get to keep those as well.

That is what a culture is: the standards a group holds each other to, sideways, without waiting for a regulator. If the job is taking advantage of people, the decent move is to leave it, and the decent response from the rest of us is to stop calling it clever.

Fraud grows wherever it is shrugged at. What we end up living with is mostly what we have agreed to put up with.