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.

It took me all of a minute and two google searches to confirm that this was a scam and find other examples of almost exactly the same wording but in reference to other people, so I’m not terribly concerned for my safety (though I will, of course, be more hypervigilant than usual because that’s how anxiety works). What IS messing me up about this is the bitter irony inherent in a situation where someone was trying to use threats of violence against me as a means of manipulating my older brother. I mean, he has historically proven that he does not care about my well-being in any way and while I’m sure he felt the need to warn our father in order to protect our younger sister or maintain whatever lie he’s telling to cover up what he did to attract the attention of this scammer in the first place (every example I’ve found that lists possible sources mentions finding a phone number on the internet advertising call girls or some kind of sex worker access), I do not believe for an instant that he could be manipulated into doing anything by threats of harm against me. He’s not, after all, a stranger to inflicting violence on me. While he’s figured out how to behave in a more socially acceptable manner since our teenaged years, I would be less surprised if he gave into a scammer because they promised to hurt me in some way in exchange than if he capitulated to a scammer’s demands in order to prevent me from being hurt. There would be no teeth in a threat against me, not unless he thought that other people might cast him out for not pretending to be concerned about me.

I’ve been thinking about that since I woke up this morning. The thought didn’t occur to me initially, at least not consciously, but I think some part of me was aware last night since I went into immediate “reassure my siblings that this is fine” mode and then stayed up until almost three playing video games, which is a pair of things I only do when I’m trying to deflect from concern about my well-being and avoid thinking about something. Can’t have the idle thoughts required to feel upset by all this if I’m too tired to have any kind of real thought process and it can’t be a big deal if I tell people that it’s not a big deal. I mean, it’s not like I feel threatened as a result of this even if a part of me thinks it would be a fitting end for the winding ways of my life if I wound up getting killed as a result of my brother’s refusal to pay off a cartel he somehow insulted. I don’t take this kind of scam seriously, as a rule, and another aspect of the bitter irony in this situation is that the way he treated me as a child and teen, the violence he enacted on me that our parents ignored and the things I had to do to survive that environment are what prepared me to watch my own back and avoid getting snatched up by a cartel doing anything short of kicking in my door and running away with me. It’s also what inspired me to take scams and the potential threats of modern life seriously enough to keep up with them such that I would instantly recognize the framing of a scam well enough to find it on google within a minute of reading it the first time.

Wrapping all around these thoughts about my brother and how I fear him showing up to hurt me more than any drug cartel is the frustrating realization that, no matter what I do, I will never be able to fully sever ties with my family completely. Short of some kind of complete digital purge of the internet and all records everywhere, I will likely still be getting invasive indentity-confirmation questions referencing places my older brother has lived despite me not keeping up with his life in over a decade and actively removing all means of contact between us more than six years ago. I will always show up as connected to him and my parents and the house I grew up in any time someone looks into me and my history. I will always have a social security number associated with my parents. I will always have a tie to them in the form of my birth ceritificate and social security card since even if I change my name completely, there will still be records tying me back to them. When scammers approach my family to attempt to manipulate them out of their liquid assets, I will always be the most-enticing option because there’s so little information available for me that it screams “hard to contact” rather than “refusing all contact.” No matter what I do, no matter what I change about myself or my life, there will always be social, societal, governmental, or digital connections between me and the family I’d forget I was born a part of if I had the choice.

I’ll get over this eventually. Like I said, I’m not terribly worried about my physical safety any more than usual in this day and age (I mean, I’m a massive, physically imposing masculine-presenting person and I STILL watch solitary vans in parking lots out of the corner of my eye). I just wasn’t prepared to have a situation like this drop into my life for any reason, let alone because my father doesn’t know how scams work these days. It is mind-boggling that his cautionary advice to the sibling acting as messenger was to tell us all to watch our credit reports because some scammer had our first name, last name, and middle initial (all information that’s easy to find online even without a paid membership to some phone number lookup service) and that he wanted to make sure that the grown-ass adult child who has explicitly told him to never contact them again was alerted to the potential that their older brother who has severely hurt them and threatened their life was being scammed by someone threatening to enact similar violence on them. Seriously, short of killing me or maiming me, there is nothing some drug cartel could do to me that would go beyond what my brother did to me. It’s just really fucked up that my father has officially done more to try to protect me from an easily verifiable scam threatening violence than he ever did to protect me from the actual violence I lived through. Fucked up and nothing less than what I’d expect from him.