Fooled Again?

10 years ago, when I was first lulled into the fantastic web of internet, everything was fascinating and I absorbed the knowledge like the Gobi Desert experiencing rain. It was only a few years later that I began to realize that what you see is not always what you get. Everyone is not out there to get you or your money, but just like the real world, there are draggers hidden under cloaks.
And unlike the old world, referring to life before internet 20 years ago, where the power of disseminating information was restricted to a few authorized bodies like journalists, experts, monarchs, government, teachers etc. Of course, back then we also did not have the laws for ‘Right to Information’, and so most of what was told was believed to be true, and an assumption that due diligence had been done before the information was dissipated to public.
Belief in information-disseminating bodies has long vanished. We are flooded with information and messages from every direction; there is no ‘one’ word you can believe. The teacher’s in school have a tough time, since kids today are ‘smart’. We too were smart with boggled eyes, always asking ‘why’, insatiated if only 2 out of 3 questions were answered. But these kids are different; they don’t want answers; they have found those and many more via the internet. The student’s quest is to judge how much the teacher knows; quiz them till they are at their wits end and run out of the class waving their hands like a mad undergone electrocution.
The only person you can believe is yourself, based on your judgment, with the sword hanging on your neck whether you were right. Tough decision to make; and sometimes everyone falters when the low hanging fruit looks juicy and tempting like a free-for-all grab - House raided by mob in Craigslist ad hoax. I wasn’t the least bit amused to read this, thinking of the horror of something alike happening to me. I have meager belongings which don’t account for much in terms of cash, but they are still very precious to me. It’s frightening to even imagine myself in that man’s shoes, watching people looting you silly over some words keyed in the cyber world.
A few months ago my acquaintance received a too-good-to-be-true job offer, with none of the usual ‘send us $1000 for visa’. He studied the email twice over, before forwarding it to me, unable to believe his good luck. When I first skimmed through it, I cried out loud ‘Luck bugger’, but on closer examination, the damn thing was a hoax. Imagine if he had put in his papers with this dream-come-true offer letter in hand!