SCAMVERSE I: THE ILLUSION OF A COMEBACK

Chapter One: The Annual Revenue Meeting

Written by Maria

Five minutes before the meeting began, there was still coffee on the table.

Five minutes after it began, there were only human lives on the screen.

Naturally, the words human lives appeared nowhere in the presentation.

The title read:

2025 TAIWAN MARKET ANNUAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW

The letters were dark blue against a clean white background. In the lower-right corner, a golden line rose confidently upward, like the growth chart of a technology company preparing for an initial public offering.

It looked nothing like retirement savings, mortgage payments, university tuition or the money families had quietly set aside for death.

The conference room occupied the twenty-seventh floor of a glass office tower.

Beyond the windows, Taipei rested beneath a pale winter sky. Apartment buildings stood in the distance like blocks arranged by an impatient child.

Behind any one of those windows, there might be a customer.

No one in the company used the word victim.

Negative terminology, management had explained, damaged team morale.

Victims were customers.

Stolen money was revenue.

A person who stopped transferring funds was customer churn.

A police report was a negative conversion.

As for those who would never again trust a stranger, a bank, a friend or even their own judgment, the system had no dedicated field.

An-Ching Hsu sat near the door.

Her official title was Senior Behavioral Data Analyst, Asia-Pacific.

The words looked impressive on her business card.

When the cards had first arrived, she had photographed one and sent it to her mother.

Her mother could not read the English, but she had noticed the gold lettering beneath the company name.

"An international company," she had replied. "You have a future there."

An-Ching had sent back a smiling emoji.

Now, looking at the presentation screen, she wanted to smile again.

Her face refused.

"First, congratulations to the Taiwan team."

The man leading the meeting wore a dark grey suit without a tie. His name was Ming-Che Kao, Director of East Asia Operations. His voice was warm and controlled, the voice of a manager about to announce the destination of the company retreat.

"After twelve months of adjustment, we have achieved our annual target."

The next slide appeared.

At its centre was a single number:

NT$100,000,000,000

One hundred billion New Taiwan dollars.

Applause moved through the room.

It was not enthusiastic, but it was perfectly coordinated.

Almost rehearsed.

Some people lowered their eyes to take notes. Others smiled. The product manager sitting beside An-Ching whispered:

"Finally."

He sounded like a founder whose company had spent ten difficult years reaching its first major revenue milestone.

Ming-Che waited for the applause to end.

"This number is not the destination," he said. "It proves only that the Taiwan market model has matured."

He pressed the remote.

The revenue figure shrank into the upper-left corner. Seven coloured circles appeared beside it, each marked with an English code name.

AURUM.

EROS.

BAZAAR.

AUTHORITY.

LABOR.

MERCY.

MIRROR.

Seven product lines.

Seven kinds of people.

Seven kinds of fracture.

The company did not use crude expressions such as types of fraud.

In internal documents, they were called trust solutions.

"Our greatest breakthrough last year," Ming-Che continued, "was not the revenue. It was cross-product conversion."

He pointed to a line on the chart.

"Low-value customers entering the system can now be developed over six to nine months and transferred into higher-value product lines. This means we are no longer conducting isolated transactions. We are building long-term customer relationships."

An-Ching looked down at her tablet.

She knew how the sentence translated into ordinary language.

Begin with a small lie.

See whether the person clicks.

See whether the person replies.

See whether fear will make them follow instructions from a stranger.

Then pass them on to a more expensive story.

She had helped build the model.

At the beginning, the company had described the project as a digital financial risk prediction programme.

Her job was to analyse social behaviour, emotional patterns and decision-making tendencies in order to identify high-risk financial consumers.

The description had not been entirely false.

They were identifying high-risk consumers.

They simply were not identifying them to offer protection.

They were identifying them for classification.

The conference-room door opened quietly.

An assistant entered and replaced Ming-Che's coffee. The cup displayed the company slogan:

WE UNDERSTAND PEOPLE.

When An-Ching first saw those words, she had thought they sounded sophisticated.

Now they sounded like a threat.

"Next," Ming-Che said, "let us review our strongest customer segment."

The screen changed to an age-distribution chart.

The group aged sixty-five and older was highlighted in gold.

"The average customer value of the mature-life segment increased by forty-one per cent."

Several people nodded.

"The retirement anxiety model has also exceeded eighty-seven per cent accuracy for the first time."

Pens moved quickly across paper.

"Customers living alone, those who have lost a spouse and those whose contact with adult children has declined continue to demonstrate the most stable conversion performance."

An-Ching's finger stopped against the tablet screen.

Stable was a useful word.

It meant that a group of people remained reliably lonely.

Reliably worried about medical costs.

Reliably afraid of becoming a burden to their children.

Reliably willing to believe that somewhere in the world there might be a patient stranger prepared to help them make money.

Ming-Che pressed the remote again.

A customer profile appeared on the screen.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of the model, the system had selected a successful case at random.

The customer's name had been partially concealed:

Chen ○-Lan, female, age sixty-seven, retired teacher.

Location: New Taipei City.

Marital status: widowed.

Primary vulnerability tags:

Retirement insecurity.

Fear of becoming dependent on children.

High trust in authority.

Moderate digital literacy.

Probability of reporting: low.

At the bottom of the screen was a sentence automatically extracted from her messages and voice records:

«I am not trying to become rich. I simply do not want to ask my children for money when I grow old.»

The room was silent.

To everyone else, it was only a sentence in a database.

A successful psychological label.

To An-Ching, it felt as though someone had opened a window inside the sealed conference room and allowed the winter air to rush in.

Her own mother had said something similar.

Not once.

Many times.

"This customer demonstrates a classic value-growth pattern," Ming-Che said. "One hundred and three days from initial contact to primary conversion. No significant resistance. Low level of family intervention."

He spoke as though discussing a subscription user.

"It is also important to note that the customer retains additional conversion potential."

A red notice appeared on the right side of the screen:

SECONDARY CONVERSION RECOMMENDED

An-Ching looked up.

"Hasn't she already completed the primary conversion?"

Her voice was not loud, but several people turned towards her.

Ming-Che's expression remained unchanged.

"And?"

"Her available financial assets have fallen to twelve per cent of their previous level."

An-Ching pointed to the figures on her tablet.

"The system shows that she cancelled an insurance policy. She has also been making enquiries about a loan secured against her home."

The room remained silent for two seconds.

Ming-Che smiled.

"An-Ching, today we are discussing the model, not the emotional condition of an individual case."

"She may have no money left."

"Having no money and having no assets are two different things."

Across the table, the legal adviser lowered his eyes and took a sip of coffee.

No one else spoke.

An-Ching understood something then.

The most important skill in a company meeting was not knowing how to speak.

It was knowing when not to speak.

Ming-Che returned to the annual report.

"The Taiwan market has proven one essential principle."

He stepped in front of the screen, where the golden line continued to rise behind him.

"We never need to create demand."

"The demand already exists."

"We need only recognise it before banks, governments and families do."

The projector light fell across his face, making him appear unusually calm.

"In 2026, our mission is to convert the Taiwan experience into an exportable standard model."

The next slide displayed a world map.

Taiwan appeared as a small golden point.

Then Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, London, New York and several African cities began to glow one after another.

It looked as though someone were lighting stars across a dark universe.

The title of the slide read:

PROJECT 2030

FROM LOCAL TRUST TO GLOBAL SCALE

The room filled with applause again.

This time, An-Ching did not join them.

She looked down at the retired teacher's profile.

The system recorded the customer's most recent login at 11:47 the previous night.

Her final message contained only one sentence:

«Teacher, I truly have no money left.»

The automated reply had been sent three seconds later:

«It is all right. We will find a way together.»

An-Ching stared at the words.

They might have been the kindest sentence in the world.

They might also have been the cruelest.

Her personal phone vibrated.

An email without a sender's name appeared on the screen.

The subject line contained four words:

YOU HAVE SEEN IT.

An-Ching did not open it.

A few seconds later, a second email arrived.

Its subject line read:

NOW THAT YOU HAVE SEEN IT, WHAT WILL YOU DO?

At the front of the room, Ming-Che was a