If you don’t live in Spain you may not have heard the story about John Hirst, a Majorcan based British expatriate who has allegedly conned and swindled his way through his life abroad and now ‘disappeared’ leaving many of his expatriate victims’ lives in ruins.
John Hirst is being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office – whilst he is allegedly in a hospital somewhere suffering from either cancer or a mental breakdown, his victims from Spain, France, the US and the UK who handed over up to £20 million all stand around in shock and try and work out how it was they were conned so spectacularly and so easily.
This story (as revealed in the Telegraph) however, highlights an interesting point – that when you move abroad you perhaps somehow become much more susceptible to smooth talking grifters. Are expats, who are living abroad and therefore away from home and their comfort zone, much more easily conned?
Most people reading this will be an expat or have lived, worked or travelled overseas at some point in their lives. Therefore I feel that you will all be able to relate to the following…
When you’re away from home, particularly in a new and unfamiliar nation, you make unlikely and unusual friendships – quite intensely and quite quickly. As you gain experience abroad and become more comfortable living the expat life, perhaps some of these friendships will fall away as you realise that you had little in common with the person in the first place. So why did you become their ‘friend’ originally? Because, chances are, they like you were an expat. Brits flock to Brits, Aussies to Aussies, Yanks to Yanks. What’s more, if those of your own ilk and nationality are thin on the ground, you’ll hook up with fellow expats simply because they too are fishes out of water like you!
This makes you vulnerable.
At the same time, those who are failures in life, who have messed up their life, who have been found out and discovered as cheats, criminals and failure, who are dissatisfied with what they have achieved in life, who are running from their old life also drift away (or leg it) overseas. They too end up in the same hangouts and haunts as we ‘genuine’ expats who have moved abroad for work, to retire and for the good of our health, wealth or lifestyle.
This means that when we ‘naturally’ drift into the comfort zone of an expat stranger, they could either be one of life’s failures or one of life’s winners, on an equal footing and of a similar mindset as ourselves. The trouble is, we won’t know until it’s possibly too late. John Hirst’s victims certainly could distinguish him from the expat crowd as an alleged liar, thief, cheat, conman and evil b*****d.
So – the question that this article poses, namely are expats who are living abroad and away from home and their comfort zone more easily conned, can be answered as follows. Expats are far more vulnerable to a conman. That’s not quite the same thing as being more easily conned or more likely to be ripped off, but it does mean that if you’re living abroad you need to be very, very careful when you pick your friends and decide to trust someone with anything from personal information to money.
Tread carefully abroad! There are plenty of genuine, likeminded people out there with whom you can become friends: equally, there are a lot of losers out there who will latch on to you in your semi-‘vulnerable’ state and leach.
