The Malaysian phone scam dilemma

OK guys, I have a situation here and I don't quite know how to react. I have been pondering over this for a few days and I thought I'd ask you for your opinions please. It concerns my mother - now last week, she received a scam call and it was pretty obvious that it was a bad attempt to extract money from an old lady like her. The caller spoke Mandarin with a very thick Malaysian accent and he was crying when my mother answered the phone. My mother asked him, "你是谁?" (Who are you?) And he replied, with a really thick Malaysian accent, "我是你的儿子." (I am your son.)

Now at this point, it should become pretty clear to her that it was clearly not me. Firstly, I don't speak to my mother in Mandarin because I know that my mother's Mandarin, quite frankly, sucks pretty bad. She just can't bloody speak Mandarin! When she tries to speak Mandarin, there are plenty of loanwords from English and Hokkien in every sentence. No, she didn't study Mandarin at school (hey, she went to school a long time ago, back in the late 40s and early 50s) when she was a student and in fact, she spoke Hokkien at home. I would normally speak to my mother in either English or Hokkien but never Mandarin.

And secondly, I don't have a Malaysian accent for a simple reason: I am not Malaysian nor have I ever lived in Malaysia - so unless I've had an acute dose of foreign accent syndrome, how the hell would I suddenly acquire a Malaysian accent? According to my dear nephew, "uncle Alex talk like Angmoh one." For the last 17 years (that's all of my adult life), I have lived in Europe, I'm the one who talks like an Angmoh, not like someone from Batu Pahat or Johor Bahru. And why the hell would I refer to myself as "我是你的儿子" - like when I call my mum on the phone, I would simply say, "Hi mum, it's me," and I would expect her to instantly recognize her son's voice - the same way I would instantly recognize my sister's or my father's voice. We're family, duh. Heck, I even recognize my cousins' voices instantly.

Do you expect your mother to recognize your voice?

Look, this conman was clearly a Malaysian amateur. (He's not an expert like Kong Hee.) Did my mother laugh and hang up the phone? No. She then asked him, "你在哪里?" (Where are you?) He then replied, "我在 Johor 新山,你一定要帮我!" (I am in Johor Bahru, you must help me!) Right, so I would have presumably flown from London to Malaysia without telling my family I am visiting and somehow got kidnapped in Johor Bahru (whilst developing a Malaysian accent in the meantime) and then call my mother for help? Like at this point, it is just ridiculous, the whole thing is totally laughable. You now what my mother did? She told the guy to wait whilst she got my father (who is incidentally from Malaysia), she then told my father to speak to the guy who called. My father spoke to that guy for like 5 seconds, gave the Malaysian caller a few choice phrases in Hokkien and hung up. Like my father instantly knew it was a scam so he knew what to do - he told the scammer to go KNNBCCB.

When my parents told me the story, I kinda just rolled my eyes at how naive and stupid my mother was, not to have spotted that it was a scam at that point. I told my mother, "yi kong yi si lr ye kia, lr an chua mai mng yi - oh lr si gwa ye ta por kia?  Gwa oo jin tsueh kia, lr simi mia?" ("He claimed he is your son, why didn't you just ask him - oh you are my son? I have so many children, what is your name?") My mother just stared blankly at me and said, "Oh I didn't think about asking him that lah." You know, you hear about scams like that and the quality of these scams are laughable at best - but to think that my mother was actually that close to falling for such a bad scam is really worrying for me.

How many people would fall for a shit scam like this?

I don't want to nag at her, tell her that she is so stupid to have almost believed a Malaysian conman like that - like come on, what the hell? I don't want to make her feel bad, but I feel I have to tell her to be a bit more wise when it comes to crap like that.  I know we don't speak everyday but surely you recognize my voice on the phone? Like seriously, WTF? Is she really that stupid and gullible? What are we to do - we can't stop my mother from using the telephone? The worst part is that I doubt my mother even realizes just how foolish and gullible she is. What if someone called up and claimed to have kidnapped her most precious grandson? If old ladies like her didn't exist, then these scammers wouldn't even try in the first place.

Look, my regular readers will know that I am not close to my mother - I live 8 time zones away and we have a formal, distant but respectful relationship. We have our differences and I very much rely on my sisters to be the "glue" to maintain any kind of relationship. She takes virtually no interest in what I do with my life and I don't mind/care either way - I can't force her to take any interest in me. We're just distant, there's nothing antagonistic in the nature of our relationship today. But when things like that happen, I have the urge, the desire to want to protect her from her own stupidity, her damn gullible nature - but I don't want to tell her, "stop being so stupid and gullible!" as it would hurt her feelings. I know if I spoke to my older sister,  she would just say, "that's fine, leave it with me, I will deal with it." But I just feel bad passing my buck to my sister all the time like that, or maybe that's what older and wiser elder siblings are for? I tell you, it's tough being my older sister - she deserves a gold medal and an award for her patience.

Thank you for reading guys, I just had to get this off my chest tonight. Please let me know what you think.