What constitutes an emergency

Last week, plus Labor Day, was a holiday, and I got to be the person on call as duty officer. This meant that I was on the hook to deal with any American citizens in Istanbul who were experiencing self-defined emergencies.

Wow, that constitutes an emergency for some! The most non-emergency call I got was a very nice woman, a naturalized citizen, whose mother or grandmother (I forget), was in the hospital for a non-life-threatening thing and was going to travel to the U.S. She was cleared to fly, but the airline required the family to purchase five seats for her so that she could lie down. Well, the family had reserved four seats but the airline lost the reservation.

The relative calls up and tells me, and then there’s a silence on the phone because I’m waiting on the emergency. Finally I realize none is forthcoming, and I ask, “So what did you think I could do for you?”

This is now my go-to question, because I’m honestly baffled at why people call me. Like seriously, what can I do? Your speakers are in customs, you missed your flight, whatever, and your thought is, “I better call the consulate!” It’d just odd.

Anyway, after several tries at explanation, I managed to get the concerned family member to understand that, while it was a sad thing the airline lost the reservation, there was nothing I could do, but stressed that, in all she had told me, at no point did she say the airline had told her there weren’t seats on the plane. Sure, you don’t have a reservation that they can find, but what you’re looking for is seats, right? She finally understood.

Others don’t get it. A person who had allegedly broken a Turkish law demanded that I tell her her rights as an American. I was like, well, in Turkey, you have none. You’re subject to Turkish law, like anyone else. I advised an attorney and offered a stock list of names and she lectured me on her opinion of Turkish lawyers, which was not positive.

My first one, though, was the most time-consuming. This guy who had been traveling in a city across the country realized that the bulk of his money had gone missing sometime during the day, and, with almost all of his remaining cash, he thought the smart move was to buy a bus ticket to Istanbul, a 12-hour ride away, so that Uncle Sam would send him forward on his journey. He even expected taxpayers to pay for the cab he’d taken to get to the consulate.

I’ve no idea how he came to the conclusion this was the thing to do; the smart thought would have been to stay put and call friends and family from where he was. He certainly didn’t think to verify that we’d be able to help. Which, BTW, we couldn’t, as we were closed and would not reopen for six more days.

He originally called at 10 a.m. or so, and on and off through the course of the day, I called his relatives on his behalf. His aunt refused to help him and hinted that this had happened before. She called his mom, and she called me. (He didn’t have her number.) She also didn’t want to assist, and when I told her there was nothing I could do, she called around and called me back, saying there was no one in the family who could/would help. I asked if she had any of his friends’ numbers (not only did he not have a credit card on him, he didn’t have a phone, either) and she assured me he had no friends, and basically implied he was my problem to work through. If I didn’t get him on his way, she said she’d call her congressman and he would contact the State Department. I told her I was the State Department, and we were closed.

Finally, around 4 p.m., I met him at the consulate – he’d been there six hours at that point – handed him the phone and told him to figure it out. And what do you know, he did. His mom came through for him and agreed to wire money, but of course, it was a holiday and no banks were open. The security guard who was there said the airport banks would be open and a light bulb went off in my head.

Airport! I could get him to the airport, and then he could get money and be on his way!  (Now that his mom agreed.) So I used my own bus pass (we were closed; we couldn’t process a loan) and 5 TL, and gave him explicit instructions on how to maneuver how to get to the airport. He thanked me and I never heard from him again, so hopefully he made it … somewhere.

But the crème of the crop was a scam victim. We get these a lot; the MO is a person develops a relationship with a patsy, then purports to be in some kind of situation that demands money. I’ve heard of cases where people have been bilked out of thousands upon thousands of dollars.

This caller swore to me it was a real relationship and assured me she’d met him in person, even though she later acknowledged she hadn’t seen him in almost a year and every time I pressed her for the last time she SPOKE to him, she started replying with, "we were texting ..."

The story was, Fiancé was in the hospital, and the doctor was demanding payment before treatment. Fiance had been in Istanbul since November, working as a consultant.

For those keeping track at home, that’s four red flags right there, and it only got better. I kept trying to explain to the caller that this was the total MO of scams but she kept insisting he was real, etc. I asked what hospital and she didn’t know. I said OK, you say the doctor is emailing you, what is the email address? Something@dr.com. Oh, yeah, that’s legit. Did the stick on that red flag poke your eye out yet? And on top of that, “DR” also texted her a photo of the guy in a bed, saying he had malaria and couldn’t speak. Scammers, who are all allegedly American citizens, NEVER opt to call the consulate themselves. Oh, and malaria is not common in Turkey.

I still think it’s a scam, because it’s just one to a T, but you want to check it out – after all, we do not want any American citizens really stranded, sick or whatever, with no recourse. So I tell her to get the name of the hospital and get me his passport number and I could try to check to see if he’s a patient there.

So then it got really fun. Fortunately for me, she didn’t just email me his passport number, she sent a scan of it. I replied immediately that, although I wasn’t an expert, I believed it to be fake – just look at the expiration date. (I was trying to be nice.) She replied – and at this point it’s all email – why, she’d never had a passport, weren’t they good for five years? I said well, no, they’re good for 10, but my point was, the abbreviation for January was “Jan,” not “Jen.” Freaking big letters, and she never looked.

Without being an expert, I saw about four other errors, too, and this was based on a jpeg the size of a postage stamp.

I emailed her that and saw she’d sent me a “boarding pass” and almost choked. I replied to her and asked if she’d put him on the flight herself, because she’d told me he left from Houston, but the Americans flight noted on the “boarding pass” went from Tucson to Chicago to London. I added that if he really wanted to fly from Houston, he’d fly from Hobby, not “West Houston Airport,” like the BP said. That, Google says, is a privately-owned airport and does not fly nonstop to Istanbul, but even if Fiance flew to Istanbul from the international Houston airport, it would connect through London on British Air, not American Airlines.

The lady sent me a short email in reply: “I hope you find and prosecute him.” I did not bother to explain that I am not a law enforcement official.