Of Identity Theft, Patterns of Grammatical Mistakes, and Prayer

Twenty four hours ago, I wrote this post and told you about how I recently met a man from Uganda on Facebook. In light of the recent public discourse about Joseph Kony and his crimes against the Ugandan people, I found this an amazing bit of synchronicity, and asked my new friend's permission to write about him and use his photo. He told me without hesitation to go ahead and use whatever I needed.

An hour ago, I received what I expected to be another typically friendly message from this same person. However, he had a big surprise for me:

excuse me mom,am sorry i dont knw you and i dont know who really invited you but it wasnt me at all but i think its been my cousin brother i work with here,i have to first confirm from him becouse i have been sick for two weeks and he is the one who knows my password for both email and facebook. [am sorry am not intrested in the people i dont know plus your stories at all, i cant even allow you to post my picture or to use it in any way even if your paying me i dont need ,but i shouldnt blame you,i should blame my cousin and if i confirm its him,i will give you his "facebook names" you ask him why he did it to me.

please mom,i cant even dare talk of politics and yet my foto is here and am not intrested in it personally [i dont know you at all ,i thinkits a revenge from my cousin brother of the girlfriend]


mom just help me you delete me out from your programs

• • 
    

So I was the victim of a vengeful cousin's prank? Hmm. Okay, I suppose it is always a possiblity that an online contact pretends to be someone who they are not. It makes one feel a bit gullible and overly trusting (why yes, I will admit to having those tendencies) but it's not that big of a deal. Whoever this person really might be, I deleted his photo and name from yesterday's post and went on with my evening. 

But my mind kept drifting back to the situation. And questions, one after the other, popped into my brain:

• Isn't it a little odd for a grown man to share his Facebook and email password with his cousin? 
• And even if he did, wouldn't it occur to him to change the passwords after he cheated with the cousin's girlfriend?
• Who is so sick that they don't even check their Facebook or email for two whole weeks?
• If this person really wanted to severe all ties to me, wouldn't it be easier to just delete me as a friend, delete the pic I posted from his photo album, and possibly even change his Facebook name? Why would he waste his time talking to me?
• If you were the angry cousin who wanted to get even for the stolen girlfriend, would you sign on to the evildoer's Facebook, add random people, and then strike up very respectful and pleasant conversations with at least one of these new friends? Seems like an odd way to extract revenge.
• Could I really have been so blind as to miss the cues of deception throughout not one or two, but four lengthy and fairly deep conversations with this person? It's not like me to misread a person so drastically.

As I pondered these questions, I remembered something else. In our last chat, after I posted the blog with his photo and name, our conversation had turned to some of the deeper issues of Joseph Kony's crimes and my friend turned markedly reticent. He asked that we move our conversation over to email, for fear that the Ugandan government may be tracking his communications.

In our email chat, he asked me several times to prove my identity, so he could be sure that he was talking to me, and not someone pretending to be me. 

He also asked me how he could be sure I was not a spy for the Ugandan government.

Remembering his guarded demeanor and suspicions about true identities gave me chills. Now I was really beginning to wonder what was going on. 

So, little criminologist that I am, I compared the spelling and grammatical style of the most recent messages to those I supposedly received from the "cousin brother." And here is what I found:

• Both persons type in all lower case letters.
• Both persons frequently use parenthetical inserts, but always use [brackets] instead of the more conventional (parentheses).
• Both persons consistently misspell the word 'because' as 'becouse.'
• Both persons use two incorrect spacing patterns with commas, either skipping spaces both before and after the comma, such as "excuse me mom,am sorry i dont knw you" or inserting a space before the comma and skippping the space that belongs after the comma, such as " i dont need ,but i shouldnt blame you."

Interesting.


Of course, none of this really proves anything. I certainly may have been duped by a friendly but revengeful cousin. 

But the more I think about it, the more I believe that I met a person who is afraid of what an innocent friendship with a talkative American might look like to his corrupt and restrictive government; who fears what they might do to him or his family; who trusts no one to be who they say they are.

That makes me really sad. All I can do at this point is pray for him. 

If you'd like to pray as well, I'd appreciate it.