74. Linda is born
- Lek’s brother had bad luck to be chosen, said Robert. The scammers had no idea that he would win. They just gave him a number and then he won.
- Where is the trick? asked Larson.
- The trick is that they only play a two-digit number.
- And?
- If you play two digit numbers one in a hundred will win.
- So the odds are 1 to 100, said Larson. That is still quite high.
- Not too high for the scammers. They send 100 people the same letter, but with different numbers. One of them will win. The winner is the chosen one, selected by ghosts or whatever. This is the one they cheat. The cost of 100 letters is moderate compared to what they can get out of the poor guy who thinks he is getting rich. Remember the first win, in this case 6000 baht, is paid by the lottery and not by the scammers. Even the phone calls are paid by the victim since the scammers never call anyone.
- But still. How can people believe this spirit stuff?
- Thais are superstitious. They believe in all sorts of magic and spirits. They are into fortune telling and divine signs and what have you.
- I thought Buddhism didn’t have any gods, said Larson
- It doesn’t, said Robert. But that doesn’t stop Thais from believing in everything from Hanuman the monkey god to Jesus Christ.
- But they have the Buddha outside every building in that little dollhouse on a pole. They put food and water in there in the morning.
- Look again, said Robert. That figure inside isn’t the Buddha. If it has a head with four faces, each looking in separate directions, it is phra Phrom, the Hindu Bhrama. He is the creator of all things. The little house he sits in is for the spirits. You can’t upset them or they will make trouble for you.
- They certainly made trouble for Noi, said Larson.
*
Bia was satisfied with the new computer. It was faster and better. Peter got a new Internet connection, and Bia enjoyed high-speed surfing.
Bia liked chatting channels. He had used them when he was a teenager, first local Thai-language channels and then English ones.
Thai boys saw chat as a game and often as role-play. If Bia put up his picture on gay.com and some farang answered Bia could let one of his friends take over the contact with the foreigner, who had no idea that he had been passed on to someone else.
The boys also liked to use pictures they had found on the Internet instead of their own pictures. Bia used a picture of a Thai male singer as his own for a while. Bia enjoyed the attention this picture got him from admiring men.
Bia even changed his online gender. He found a picture of a Thai supermodel posing in a bikini and used it to chat in channels for straight men. Bia called himself Linda. Linda was a flirty and hugely popular figure on the net from the moment of her debut. Men from all over the world wanted to chat to Linda and they all praised her beauty. Bia thought this was fun. He took the flattery to heart without reflecting much about the fact that some of the men out there were seriously interested in “Linda”.
Bia thought this was harmless play. They men he spoke to were on the other side of the world. He didn’t forsee any problems arising from his dishonest identity.
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