'Your son will die': How blessing scammers prowl streets

BBC Tuyet van Huynh (left) is campaigning to track down the scammers

Chinese communities are being targeted by scammers who trick older women out of their valuables by persuading them their loved ones are in danger. After a wave of cases on the streets of the UK, US, Australia and Canada, police are investigating and victims' families are trying to find the perpetrators. The blessing scam is an elaborate piece of criminal street theatre. A gang of usually three women act out a well-rehearsed script in Cantonese for an audience of one - the unsuspecting victim. Mungnee is a Chinese Malaysian Londoner in her sixties. She was approached on Harrow Road in West London while on her way to yoga, by a crying woman. The woman asked in Cantonese if Mungnee knew a specific Chinese traditional healer in the area, as her husband was sick.

Mungnee feels she was drawn in by the scammers because she holds spiritual beliefs

Quickly, a second Cantonese-speaking stranger appeared, claiming she knew the healer, and offering to take them to him. Mungnee was swept along, keen to help the woman who was so upset. On a quieter side street, a third woman joined the group, claiming to be related to the healer and went to see if he could help. When she returned from speaking to the healer for 15 minutes, she had troubling news. Through his mystical powers, he had apparently discovered Mungnee was also in danger. He miraculously seemed to know all about her marriage problems, the shooting pain in her right leg - things Mungnee had not shared with them. But the next revelation was what shocked Mungnee. “Your son is going to have an accident in the next three days and he's going to die.” The woman told Mungnee the healer could bestow a blessing that would protect her adult son. The ladies told her: “You need to take a handful of rice, and put in as much gold and cash in a bag as you can”. They would say a blessing over the valuables. Mungnee says she felt reassured by the promise her items would be returned to her after the blessing. One of the women rushed Mungnee home to collect her jewellery, then to the bank to withdraw £4,000 in cash from her savings. The valuables were placed in a plastic bag. Mungnee thinks this must have been the moment the bags were exchanged. “It was quick as a flash - her hands are so nimble. I didn't see anything.” When she got home, Mungnee was shocked to look inside the black bag and find only a brick, a piece of cake, and two bottles of water. She says: “That's when I just turned cold.. and then I just told my son. ‘I think I've been conned. I've been scammed.’” Some of the items stolen had been in the family for generations, passed down by her mother.

New South Wales Police Police in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK have issued warnings about blessing scams over the past year

Mungnee’s experience is a textbook example of a blessing scam. The BBC has spoken to multiple victims who all tell similar stories - from the distraught stranger, to the claims evil spirits are threatening a relative. Even the name of the fictional healer is the same in many cases - ‘Mr Koh’. All the victims are scammed within a few hours, in Mungnee’s case the whole con only took about three hours from beginning to end. Anqi Shen is a law professor at Northumbria University and a former Chinese police officer. She believes the blessing scam is the latest example of a centuries old tradition of street crime that exploits spiritual beliefs. “Chinese people tend to keep some valuable jewellery especially pieces made of gold, silver, jade, believed to hold protective powers,” Shen explains. She says it’s believable to victims that after such items are blessed, they could offer even greater protection.

Tuyet van Huynh A social media campaign has encouraged other blessing scam victims to come forward

Tuyet van Huynh has started a social media campaign to raise awareness about the blessing scam, after her mother was scammed out of tens of thousands of pounds in May. Her mum was shopping in Upton in East London when three women playing the same roles persuaded her that her son was threatened by evil spirits. Police in the US, Canada, and Australia have issued warnings about blessing scams over the past year. In the UK, Mungnee and Tuyet’s mother have both reported their cases to the Metropolitan Police, who have also revealed they are investigating a number of cases in the Islington area of London. Tuyet has received reports of other incidents in Lewisham, Romford, Liverpool and, Manchester. She began to investigate what happened by gathering CCTV recordings from the area where her mother was approached. Tuyet says the footage showed her mother "followed every instruction to the point where she was like a zombie".

Tuyet van Huynh Tuyet showed the BBC the CCTV footage which she tracked down of her mum with the scammers

Tuyet’s mother can’t explain how the crooks pulled her in with the story of the healer, as she is adamantly not superstitious nor spiritual. Tuyet wondered if something else might have been involved. She began to research if there was a drug that could have put her mum under somebody’s influence, but also leave her lucid enough to gather her valuables from hiding places around her home. She has a theory: “It's a possibility that this is a drug called the Devil's Breath.” Scopolamine, colloquially known as Devil’s Breath, is used to treat motion sickness. In the right dose it can reportedly make people highly suggestable - temporarily compromising a person’s free will. It can be administered to victims in the street, without them realising they have been drugged. Tuyet has no evidence that this medication was used in her mother’s or any other case. It is one of very few drugs that could have such a lucid effect, and it has been used in robberies in Ecuador, France and Vietnam, as well as murders and sexual assaults in Colombia.

Devil’s Breath is derived from a flower that grows in Colombia

While it's not known if this drug is involved in blessing scams in the UK, even if it was it would be difficult to establish. The drug passes through the body very quickly, so when Tuyet tried to get her mum tested for the drug the next day, it was already too late. Lisa Mills, a fraud expert from the charity Victim Support, says there may be other reasons the scam is so effective, and the set-up is designed to reel victims in quickly. “You are getting people that mirror you in terms of you know they look like you. They're female, similar age, speaking your language,” she explains.

Blessing scam warnings are circulating in Chinese community centres in the UK

At the moment the scammers are still at large, but some victims' families are determined to find them Mungnee says: “I told the police, I'm willing to do anything to catch these people”. What also upsets her is that the scammers are Chinese: “They are conning their own people”. Additional reporting by Austin Landis in Colombia.

Migrant deportations to increase, says EU chief

In her letter to member states, she said the return rate of irregular migrants from EU countries is currently only about 20% - meaning the vast majority of people who are ordered to leave an EU member state do not.

Von der Leyen - who is just starting a second five-year term as European Commission chief - appears to be responding to pressure on migration from across Europe.

She made the remarks in a letter to member states ahead of the meeting in Brussels on Thursday and Friday, where she said the European Commission would present a new proposal for legislation to increase deportations of migrants.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said the bloc could "draw lessons" from the contested Italian policy of processing migrants offshore in Albania ahead of an EU summit focusing on migration.

Many simply stay put or move to another country within the bloc, she said.

Member states should all recognise the decisions taken by other EU countries to ensure that "migrants who have a return decision against them in one country cannot exploit cracks in the system to avoid return elsewhere", Von der Leyen wrote.

Her comments come as Italy kicks off its long-awaited scheme, under which some of the migrants rescued in the Mediterranean will be sent to Albania for processing.

Earlier this week, 16 men of Bangladeshi and Egyptian origin were moved from the migrant hotspot of Lampedusa, off the coast of Sicily, to one of two purpose-built centres on the Albanian coast where their asylum claims will be examined.

The centres, which cost about €650m (£547m), were due to open last spring but were plagued by long delays, have been paid for by the Italian government and will be operated under Italian law.

They will house migrants while Italy examines their asylum requests. Pregnant women, children and vulnerable people will be excluded from the plan.

Political opponents of right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as well as several NGOs have criticised Italy's deal with Albania.

Riccardo Magi, an MP with the left-wing +Europa party, said the Albania scheme was "cruel, useless and expensive", while NGO Doctors Without Borders said it was "likely to result in further harm and violation of human rights".

However, addressing MPs on Tuesday, Meloni argued that the plan was "a new, courageous, unprecedented path" which "perfectly reflected the European spirit".

The implementation and the results of the Albania agreement will be watched closely by many EU member states, several of whom have attempted to respond to a surge in support for far-right parties by hardening their rhetoric and their approach to migration.

In the last few weeks alone, Germany reintroduced land border checks, the French government said it would look into tightening immigration legislation and Poland announced a plan to temporarily suspend the right to asylum for people crossing the border.

Polish PM Donald Tusk said the controversial move was meant to stop Belarus from "destabilising" Poland by allowing large numbers of migrants into the country.

In France and Germany, it was grisly murders which prompted calls for tougher action on immigration. A Syrian failed asylum seeker stabbed three people to death in Solingen, while a young student was murdered by a Moroccan national near Paris. In both cases, the killings were carried out by men who had been given expulsion orders that had not been enforced.

Last month, 15 member states signed a proposal by Austria and the Netherlands to improve the "efficiency" of the deportations system.

In pictures: Life of former One Direction star Liam Payne

Singer Liam Payne has died at the age of 31.

Payne rose to stardom in the group One Direction, before going on to have a solo career.

He had a son, Bear, with the former Girls Aloud singer Cheryl.

Here, we take a look at his life in pictures.

How does WhatsApp make money? It's free - with some tricks

Getty Images The main messaging apps are all free to use, so what is in it for them?

In the past 24 hours I’ve written more than 100 WhatsApp messages. None of them were very exciting. I made plans with my family, discussed work projects with colleagues, and exchanged news and gossip with some friends. Perhaps I need to up my game, but even my most boring messages were encrypted by default, and used WhatsApp’s powerful computer servers, housed in various data centres around the world. It’s not a cheap operation, and yet neither I nor any of the people I was chatting with yesterday, have ever parted with any cash to use it. The platform has nearly three billion users worldwide. So how does WhatsApp – or zapzap, as it’s nicknamed in Brazil - make its money? Admittedly, it helps that WhatsApp has a massive parent company behind it – Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram as well.

Individual, personal WhatsApp accounts like mine are free because Whatsapp makes money from corporate customers wanting to communicate with users like me. Since last year firms have been able to set up channels for free on Whatsapp, so they can send out messages to be read by all who choose to subscribe. But what they pay a premium for is access to interactions with individual customers via the app, both conversational and transactional. The UK is comparatively in its infancy here, but in the Indian city of Bangalore for example, you can now buy a bus ticket, and choose your seat, all via Whatsapp. “Our vision, if we get all of this right, is a business and a customer should be able to get things done right in a chat thread,” says Nikila Srinivasan, vice president of business messaging at Meta. “That means, if you want to book a ticket, if you want to initiate a return, if you want to make a payment, you should be able to do that without ever leaving your chat thread. And then just go right back to all of the other conversations in your life.” Businesses can also now choose to pay for a link that launches a new WhatsApp chat straight from an online ad on Facebook or Instagram to a personal account. Ms Srinivasan tells me this is alone is now worth “several billions of dollars” to the tech giant.

Meta Meta's Nikila Srinivasan says the aim is for firms to increasingly communicate with customers via Whatsapp

Other messaging apps have gone down different routes. Signal, a platform renowned for its message security protocols which have become industry-standard, is a non-profit organisation. It says it has never taken money from investors (unlike the Telegram app, which relies on them). Instead, it runs on donations – which include a $50m (£38m) injection of cash from Brian Acton, one of the co-founders of WhatsApp, in 2018. “Our goal is to move as close as possible to becoming fully supported by small donors, relying on a large number of modest contributions from people who care about Signal,” wrote its president Meredith Whittaker in a blog post last year. Discord, a messaging app largely used by young gamers, has a freemium model – it is free to sign-up, but additional features, including access to games, come with a pricetag. It also offers a paid membership called Nitro, with benefits including high-quality video streaming and custom emojis, for a $9.99 monthly subscription. Snap, the firm behind Snapchat, combines a number of these models. It carries ads, has 11 million paying subscribers (as of August 2024) and also sells augmented reality glasses called Snapchat Spectacles. And it has another trick up its sleeve - according to the website Forbes, between 2016-2023 the firm made nearly $300m from interest alone. But Snap’s main source of revenue is from advertising, which brings in more than $4bn a year.

Getty

The Blessed Madonna: 'Rave degenerates saved my life'

Eva Pentel

23 September, 2024. Packing day. Marea Stamper, aka DJ extraordinaire The Blessed Madonna, is cramming her belongings into well-worn suitcases, ahead of a forthcoming Australian tour. There’s no stress. She’s done this thousands of times before, playing everywhere from Berlin’s legendary nightclub Berghain to the Coachella Festival, where she headlined the Mojave stage in 2022. Sipping on an iced coffee (“if I could have this intravenously, I would”), Stamper is upbeat and fighting fit, despite a recent stay in hospital. “I've been struggling with persistent anaemia for some time, and they finally decided to figure out why, so I had some outpatient surgery last week,” she explains. “They really fixed me up. Otherwise, I would have died on this next tour.” It’s no exaggeration to say that would have been a huge loss. Stamper is one of the most celebrated DJs of her generation, spreading the gospel of dance music through her uplifting festival sets, while consistently breaking glass ceilings (in 2016, she became the first woman to be named DJ of the year by Mixmag). Her Australian tour marks the fulfilment of a promise. Her last trip Down Under was cut short by Covid-19. “I sprinted out of a hotel room to get onto a flight and come home,” she says, recalling both her last-minute panic, and the surprise of a heavily-discounted first class ticket on an empty plane.

Stamper changed her stage name from The Black Madonna to The Blessed Madonna in 2020, amid the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests.

With nightclubs shut down, she spent the pandemic remixing Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia album in her pyjamas; then scored a surprise hit when Fred Again sampled one of their conversations on his song (Marea) We Lost Dancing. “We’ve lost hugs with friends and people that we love,” Stamper says over the track’s bubbling synths. “If I can live through this next six months, day by day, what comes next will be marvellous.” Serendipitously, the song helped Stamper secure a record deal with Warner Records. This Friday, she releases a star-studded debut album, Godspeed, which features Kylie Minogue, Joy Crookes and Jamie Principle. It’s fair to say it's been a long time coming.

Teenage rave queen

Stamper was born in 1977 and grew up in rural Kentucky, the first generation of her family to live outside of the Appalachian mountains. Her father was the well-regarded blues musician Mike Stamper, and her mum, Louise Renee, was a librarian – but with little money coming into the household, Stamper was a high school outcast. She once got detention for failing to show up with lunch money, and her appearance – “butch” attire, with her hair dyed purple and piled into a beehive – made her a target for bullies. “I would get the crap kicked out of me every day,” she recalls, “so I was not particularly interested in going to school.” Salvation came from (where else?) an episode of Beverly Hills 90210, where the cast visited a rave. Inspired, Stamper snuck into her first house party at the age of 14, and found her true calling. “They had to peel me off the speakers,” she later recalled. But her father was furious. A heavy drinker, he was in the middle of a seven-year stretch of sobriety and “aggressively wanted me to adopt the values of whatever rehab programme he was in,” Stamper recalls. “He just said, ‘You can’t go to raves, you’re too young. All these people, you think they’re going to be your buddies, and you think they’re going to be there for you – but they won’t.'" Looking back, she’s happy to confirm he was wrong. “When my dad’s wife died a couple of years back, it was those rave degenerates who were there for me,” she says. “They stuck with me and they fed me and put me back together. Our bond is deep, spiritual, forever.”

The Blessed Madonna/Instagram As a 20-year-old, Stamper enrolled in college to study English, but spent her free time learning to DJ with the college radio station's collection of funk and soul records

She’s known some of them since she dropped out of school aged 16 to sell mixtapes out of the back of her car across the American Midwest. Others helped her secure her first DJ sets in Chicago, initially as Lady Foursquare, then The Black Madonna. Under that moniker, she started releasing music in 2012, gaining widespread acclaim for tracks like Exodus and the mountainous house anthem He Is The Voice I Hear. By 2017, she had a 13-week, sold out residency at London’s XOYO club, and her own radio station in the video game Grand Theft Auto V. Work on her album started around the same time. Stamper confesses it’s been scrapped and rewritten several times. But one track has survived every incarnation: We Still Believe, a tribute to sweat-soaked warehouse raves that she wrote in her attic more than a decade ago. “The first version has my little voice recorded on a BlackBerry, to give you a sense of how long ago it was." Before she could include it on the album, she had to reclaim the rights from the independent label who'd originally released it in 2013. “They’d given me a really outstanding deal of, you know, ‘We're going to control this in perpetuity for $300' or whatever,” Stamper says, "but, at the time, I was just excited that anyone wanted to put my music out." After buying it back, she enlisted one of her heroes, Jamie Principle, to re-record the vocals - a love letter to the unifying power of dance music. Principle, whose 1984 anthem Your Love is ground zero for Chicago house, also appears in a spoken-word interlude on the album, describing how the scene “went all to hell when the money came into it”. Over the years, there have been accusations of unpaid royalties and ripped off songs. Stamper is disgusted. “The guys who made these foundational records can't get medical care,” she says. “They have to have fundraisers to get a car fixed. Jamie Principle never made a dollar from any of his records.”

Eva Pentel The Blessed Madonna and Kylie Minogue shot the video for their recent collaboration Edge Of Saturday Night at the legendary Pikes hotel in Ibiza

Jodhpur: India's vanishing 'blue' city

AFP Brahmapuri’s blue homes have become a distinct marker of Jodhpur’s identity

The neighbourhood of Brahmapuri in India’s Jodhpur city stands at the foot of a famous fort that’s perched atop a hill. Built in 1459 by the Rajput king Rao Jodha - after whom the city is named - the walled, fortified settlement came up in the Mehrangarh Fort’s shadow, and was eventually recognised as the old or original city of Jodhpur, with azure-coloured homes. Esther Christine Schmidt, assistant professor at Jindal School of Art and Architecture, says that the iconic blue colour likely wasn't adopted before the 17th Century. But since then, the area's blue-coloured homes have become a distinct marker of Jodhpur’s identity and garnered attention from around the world. In fact, Jodhpur, in Rajasthan state, is called the 'Blue City' because Brahmapuri remains its heart, despite expansions over the last 70 years, explains Sunayana Rathore, the curator of the Mehrangarh Museum.

Getty Images Jodhpur has often been compared to Chefchaouen, which is visited by tourists from around the world

Brahmapuri - which roughly translates to "the town of Brahmins" in Sanskrit - was built as a colony of upper-caste families who adopted the colour blue as a symbol of their sociocultural piety in the Hindu caste system. They set themselves apart, much like the Jews of Chefchaouen - or the blue city of Morocco - who settled in the older part of town known as Medina, in the 15th Century, while fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. They are believed to have coloured their homes, mosques and even public offices in a rinse of blue, considered a divine hue in Judaism, signifying the holy skies. Eventually, the colour proved to be beneficial in more ways than one. The blue paint mixed with limestone plaster - also used in the homes of Brahmapuri - cooled the interiors of the structures, besides bringing in tourists drawn by the neighbourhood’s striking appearance. But unlike in Chefchaouen, the blue colour in Jodhpur has begun to fade. There are several reasons for this. Historically, blue was a viable option for the residents of Brahmapuri because of the easy availability of natural indigo in the region - the town of Bayana in eastern Rajasthan was then one of the major indigo-producing centres in the country. But over the years, indigo fell out of favour because growing the crop damaged the soil excessively.

Tarun Sharma The blue hues of Jodhpur are giving way to other colours

Moreover, temperatures have risen so much now that the blue paint is not enough to keep the homes cool. An increase in disposable incomes has also led to a gradual shift to modern amenities like air conditioners that help people cope with the searing heat. “Temperatures have risen gradually over the years,” says Udit Bhatia, assistant professor of civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Gandhinagar, who works on resilience infrastructure and the impacts of climatic extremes on built and natural systems. A trend analysis done by IIT Gandhinagar showed that the average temperature of Jodhpur rose from 37.5C in the 1950s to 38.5C by 2016. Apart from keeping houses cool, Mr Bhatia says the paint also had pest-repelling qualities as natural indigo was mixed with bright blue copper sulphate, a popular antifouling agent commonly used in paints from the 20th Century.

Tarun Sharma With rising temperatures, the blue paint is not enough to keep houses cool

While Mr Bhatia doesn’t think that urbanisation is evil, he points out that it can lead to the rather unscientific abandonment of traditions that were designed to serve systems and ecologies. “Yesterday, if someone was walking down an alley in Jodhpur with blue homes on either side, and today they are walking down the same alley where the homes are now painted in a darker colour, even the lightest breeze will make them feel hotter than what they felt earlier,” he says. It’s called the heat island effect, where the effect of rising temperatures is worsened when the heat and sunlight are amplified and reflected back into the environment by the concrete, cement and glass used to build structures. With darker paints, the impact is magnified further. Moreover, with cities increasingly opening up to newer cultures and people, indigenous methods of building - like using lime plaster in hotter climes - are being replaced with newer techniques like using cement or concrete, which do not absorb the blue pigment well.

Getty Images According to some estimates, about half of the roughly 33,000 homes in Brahmapuri are still blue

Aditya Dave, a 29-year-old civil engineer from Brahmapuri, says that his 300-year-old family home has held on to blue for the most part, though, occasionally, they repaint the outer walls in other colours now. That’s mainly because the scarcity of indigo has driven up costs in recent years. Repainting houses blue would cost around 5,000 rupees ($60; £45) up until a decade ago, while today, it would be more than 30,000 rupees. “Today, there are also open drains lining homes which dirties the blue paint and damages the walls,” says Mr Dave. That’s why when he built his own house in Brahmapuri five years ago, he chose a tile facade which doesn’t need to be refurbished frequently. “It’s simply more cost-effective that way,” he says.

Tarun Sharma Many residents say the city is losing its unique identity which draws tourists from around the world

But this transformation leaves visitors feeling cheated, says Deepak Soni, a garments seller who works with local authorities to preserve the existing blue homes of Brahmapuri, and restore the ones that have abandoned the hue. “We should feel embarrassed that when someone comes looking for the homes that formed the identity of our city, they don’t find them. So many foreigners compare Jodhpur to Chefchaouen. If Chefchaouen has managed to keep their homes blue for centuries, why can’t we?” he asks. In 2018, Mr Soni, originally a resident of Brahmapuri who now lives beyond the walled part of Jodhpur, negotiated with local authorities and communities to save the unique heritage of their hometown. Since 2019, he has also raised funds locally from Brahmapuri residents to have the outer walls of 500 homes painted blue each year.

Tarun Sharma Some activists have tried to raise funds to paint the outer walls of homes in blue