My Korean cellphone service provider, KT (Korea Telecom) likes to send me public service announcements via text message. Mostly these seem useless – though one time it warned of some flooding up in Paju, where I might, conceivably, have been going. Mostly I just scan the messages and try to get the gist of them, and then delete them.
I got one a while back that had me stumped. It said:
[Web발신]
검찰, 경찰, 금감원을 사칭하여 현금이나 계좌이체를 요구하면 100% 보이스피싱!
I read the message, and despite having a general idea of the gist of the message – something about inappropriate impersonation of police or prosecutors, some kind of warning about a scam – I nevertheless was unable to the parse the last word. That last term was "100% 보이스피싱!" – well, the transcription would be [bo.i.seu.pi.sing], which I knew would be some kind of English borrowing – the last syllable -싱 [-sing] gives it away, since it's a fairly rare syllable in Korean, and certainly doesn't occur at the end of words. It was clearly the English "-ing" ending, which the Koreans love to borrow, sometimes inappropriately. But sounding it out, the best I could come up with was "boys pissing". Unfortunately, that seemed like an unlikely bit of English borrowing for a public service announcement from my cellphone carrier. Were people impersonating boys pissing? Was this a problem?
After having given up on figuring it out on my own, I plugged it into the googletranslate, which gave me the obvious choice: "voice phishing". It was a warning about voice-phishing, not about boys pissing.
I think it was more interesting, before. Although kinda weird, right?
[daily log: walking, 7km]