From the office of ROLAND ROCCHICCIOLI

FOOLS and their money are soon parted! I know from experience. Someone unceremoniously relieved me of a million dollars plus. I have learned to accept I was not the victim. Unintentionally, yet irrefutably, I was the architect of my own misfortune.Ageing is no joke. Time passes and leaves its shadow. Bette Davis said, “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.” Specifically, romantic fraud is reported as ‘tragedies of the broken-hearted’ — ignoring utterly the vanity which wrought the calamity.

Society’s pursuit of corporate fairness has weakened the concept of personal accountability and replaced it with a penchant for profound and spectacular stupidity — and an expectation a financial institution will pay the cost of individual imagining.

We are expected to sympathise with a faded Romeo who ludicrously fantasises a digital femme fatale — bearing an uncanny likeness to Cindy Crawford — has fallen for his octogenarian charisma. Ignoring flashing red lights, the wailing Klaxon, his estranged family, and the rudimentary laws of probability because his ego demands the illusion be true — he sends his life savings into the ether whereupon the figure of his passion goes AWOL! “There is no fool like an old fool!”

Women are equally culpable. We are expected to offer restitution to a lonely woman who has persuaded herself a twenty-four-year-old black, Calvin Klein, photoshopped underwear model from Nigeria is smitten — crooning at the full moon like a love-sick troubadour! To compound her fiscal folly she readily parts with hundreds of thousands of dollars to guarantee the Yahoo Boy’s immediate flight to her waiting arms — or was it to treat the terminal cancer which miraculously presented in his mother — overnight!

Having been deprived of perpetual connubial bliss — and cognisant of their folly and facing years of bleak penury — they direct unmitigated rage at their bank with all the wrath of scorned lovers — demanding full compensation — and protesting the bank should have intervened — ludicrously labelling it a system failure. One wonders — in which parallel universe? Stop apportioning blame.

Loneliness notwithstanding — they were not defrauded by a criminal mastermind — they were undone by personal flattery and wanton vanity — a tragic insatiability to demonstrate their sexual or romantic allure. The theft is not complex corporate fraud — it is an unfortunate fantasy hewn of their own silliness.

Perplexingly, the regulatory impulse is to absolve the foolhardiness and to baselessly blame financial institutions — rapacious as they are! Politicians and consumer advocacy groups are muttering darkly about enforcing compulsory reimbursements for all scam victims. Why? It is a classic moral hazard — a risible zeitgeist. Extrapolating in extremis — if you jump from a cliff because a stranger on the internet osmotically promised you the gift of flight, it is not the council’s responsibility to install a safety net before you hit the rocks. Why would you believe you could fly?

Compulsorily insuring against society’s paucity of common sense is not establishing a safer world. It is creating a breeding ground to encourage idiocy. Financial institutions are repositories for funds — they are not state-appointed sentinels — nannies for those adults who meander recklessly — wittingly indulging their peccadilloes.

There is no absence of compassion, but ultimately we are responsible for our own lives. Choosing to titillate your vanity with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of digital fairy dust is your prerogative; however, do not come running for restitution when the mirror shatters. You created your make-believe — now live with your insolvency.

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