Content Warning: mentions of my childhood trauma, focused on threats of violence and non-specific references to violence.

I’ve had a very weird twenty-four hours. I was just minding my own business last night when one of my siblings texted our little “middlest siblings” groupchat to let the other two of us (who are largely estranged from the family) know that our eldest sibling had been targeted by a scammer. Given the proliferation of scammers and how little is done to prevent them these days, that alone was hardly surprising. What was surprising was that the scam was the “Mexican cartel threatens violence against the target and the target’s family if money is not sent” and the family members listed to shock the target into compliance were myself and my younger sibling. The two estranged members of the family. There’s plenty of explanation why the two of us would be called out by a scammer. We’re the two who have moved the furthest from the rest of the family and I’ve put a lot of effort into keeping my digital footprint small, so I would appear more distant and less likely to be in contact. Levying threats against me, by dropping my name and vaguely reference the potential for violence, could be difficult to confirm or refute since, due to distance, it’s more difficult to visually confirm that there’s nothing wrong. And while my younger sibling’s digital footprint is larger than mine, it’s still much smaller than most people our age and they’ve done a lot of the same work to create distance from our family even if they didn’t move as far away. By all accounts, anyone with access to one of those phone number lookup databases (which I used once a long time ago to confirm that I’d managed to largely excise my recent information from the internet) would be able to look at the available information and see that the two of us are far removed from the rest of the family and probably the best names to drop for unverifiable threats.