Genie With The Light-fingered Flair

Sometimes you can hardly believe your ears. I suspect the people doing this can hardly believe their luck. Apparently police in Bangladesh have been alerted to a widespread scam in which crooks get a few personal details about people, ring them on their cell phones claiming that they are genies. Genies (jinni in Arabic) are invisible supernatural beings mentioned in the Koran and Islamic theology. They are capable of great powers which they can use for good or evil. These ‘cell-phone genies’ threaten their victims with disaster unless they pay up large amounts of money and, this is the astonishing part, many people actually believe them and hand over the money. ‘It has become an epidemic here’, said Farhad bin Imrul Kayes, police chief of Govindaganj district. ‘In the last three months alone we have arrested twenty four of these so-called ‘kings of genies’, some of whom have even become rich in just a year’, he told AFP. ‘Many of the these cheats are illiterate but they are very smart’, said sub-inspector Abdun Nur, who led several clandestine operations against the fraudsters. There is a wonderful old Chinese saying that goes, ‘The sky has a limit and the ocean has a limit, but human stupidity has no limit’.