When the real message looks fake

A woman in Marrakech sews leather sandals and sends them across Morocco by courier. Every order gets a short message from her: the customer's name, the address, the parcel number, a link to follow it.

More and more, her customers do not open it.

They have been taught not to. The fraudulent messages now landing on everyone's phone carry the same details she does. They know the recipient's name and street. They mention a parcel. They sound like a courier, or a bank, or a relative in a hurry, and they are written with real care.

So the sensible shopper has learned a rule: anything personal and urgent is probably a trap. And the honest seller, whose message is personal and urgent because she is trying to get a parcel into someone's hands, now looks exactly like the people pretending to be her.

What saddens me is less the cleverness than where it goes. Genuine skill is being spent making lies more convincing. The same patience that could build a good small shop is being used to impersonate one.

And the cost is not paid only by the people who get fooled. It is paid by every real sender whose message now arrives under suspicion, whose reminders are filtered away, whose customers hesitate before trusting a link that is, this once, exactly what it says.

Trust used to be the default and doubt the exception. The fraudsters have turned that around, and the woman with her sandals pays for it in parcels sitting at the depot, waiting for someone brave enough to tap.