Voice Phishing
"Meow..."
I let out a soft little cry and slipped along quietly behind Yuyeon. The second she noticed me, of course, she'd grab me on the spot and haul me straight back home, so I padded after her on silent jelly-soft paws, stalking as carefully as I could manage.
Luckily, being a cat made it almost too easy to use cover. I no longer had a human's bulk to hide, so whenever Yuyeon glanced back I only had to dart behind a utility pole or a trash bin and vanish. Her eyes never once caught me.
Even human-on-human stalking can go unnoticed if you put your mind to it. A small, quick cat's stalking? There was no chance of getting caught.
Running recon in a cat's body did, however, bloom with unexpected complications. While I was busily trotting along so I wouldn't lose Yuyeon's back far ahead of me, random people on the street would spot me out of nowhere, eyes lighting up as they closed in. Men, women, old and young — whole little crowds of them.
"Oh my gosh! Look at that one — what a gorgeous cat!"
"I'm losing it, that is so cute...! Look at that coat. Doesn't even look like a stray."
"Whoa... the way its fur shines in the sunlight. Insane."
"Yo, that looks purebred. Should we just snatch it and sell it?"
Snatch and sell? The hell you will, you people!
"Haaaah!"
Every time some human reached toward me with shady intentions, I bared my needle-sharp fangs and unleashed a fierce hiss, then bolted full speed out of their hands. No matter how quick a human's reflexes were, nobody was catching a four-legged cat in a flat-out sprint barehanded.
And if I truly got cornered with nowhere left to run, I simply dove under the nearest parked car.
The grimy, oil-stained undercarriage of a vehicle was an impregnable fortress that large-bodied people could never squeeze into.
Lying flat in that dark underbelly, I suddenly found myself flooded with childhood memories of neighborhood soccer games, sweating bullets every time the ball rolled under a car. Back then I'd had to shove my arm into that narrow gap and force my whole body in just to fish the ball out. Now that I was fist-sized, a mindless little slide was all it took to slip right under.
No more straining to jam myself into tight spaces. No more fishing around under cars with broom handles or other tools. Talk about a different era.
"Ah, yes! Boss, I took the pictures like you said and just sent them."
Meanwhile Yuyeon was diligently wandering the neighborhood alleys, snapping photos on her smartphone and sending them off. Walking in the sunlight, she looked for all the world like someone simply enjoying a peaceful day. My suspicions, though, hadn't eased in the slightest. If anything, they were hardening into certainty.
A few alley photos and they'd pay her two hundred thousand won for the day? In this day and age, the mere existence of a part-time gig that sweet defied belief.
If a gold-mine job like that actually existed, you'd introduce it first to your own friends and family — not hand it to some total stranger like Yuyeon.
"What? I just have to take an envelope?"
Of course. A bad feeling never lies.
Yuyeon had stopped mid-photo to keep the call going, and the mystery person who'd offered her the job had finally shown their true colors, handing down a different assignment.
"Okay... got it. I'll head there now."
Yuyeon, clueless about how the world worked, accepted the order without a shred of suspicion. That blank, obedient answer told me exactly how this was going. This was a hundred percent a voice phishing courier role.
If I'd still had a proper human body, I could have simply stepped in front of her and explained everything carefully. If that didn't work, one call to 112 for the police would have settled it.
But as a cat, I could do nothing — not legally, not physically.
Ah... no! Snap out of it, you idiot!
While I was burning up inside, wracking my brain for any way to fix this, Yuyeon had already reached the rendezvous point and taken the cash envelope from a voice phishing victim.
The sight of it made my face go white.
These days, social attitudes and sentencing for voice phishing crimes were getting viciously severe. Korean police almost never caught the real heads of these operations or the core members. The actual criminals all set up call centers overseas — China, Southeast Asia — and made their calls from safety.
So cops desperate for results had started hunting the disposable tails instead: the hired voice phishing part-timers. Unable to land the real fish, they took out their frustration by locking up whatever husks they could get their hands on.
In a way it was the product of police incompetence, but either way, once you got caught doing a courier gig like this, no amount of "I didn't know" would save you. Suspended sentence was the baseline. If the damages were large, or if you couldn't reach a settlement with the victim, even a first offender could go straight into custody and serve real time — three to six months minimum of cold prison and bean-rice.
Considering how soft Korean courts usually were with light offenses — first-timers for anything short of murder or truly heinous felonies almost always walked with probation or a fine — the punishment for couriers was brutally heavy. There was a reason the country was full of high-recidivism offenders. And now Yuyeon had stepped right into this nightmare crime.
Should I race ahead and block her with my whole body...? But if I showed myself for no good reason, she'd just force me home, tie me down, and go back out.
Ugh, if I could just say one single human sentence...!
I ached for that talking cat from some cartoon I'd watched as a kid. If only I could speak human language as fluently as that little guy.
While my worries stacked on top of each other without end, Yuyeon was walking deeper into a damp, shadowy stretch of alley. Even in broad daylight the sun barely reached it, and foot traffic had completely died off.
She stopped, checked her surroundings once, then shoved the victim's cash-stuffed envelope deep into the gap under a discarded outdoor air-conditioning unit. Then she pulled out her phone and snapped a photo. The final dump stage of a voice phishing crime.
The hired part-timer stashes the money at a designated spot; a waiting member of the organization checks the photo, strolls over, and quietly recovers the cash. That was how it worked.
"Meow..."
I stared at Yuyeon's back with a faintly trembling gaze. She was barely twenty, a total social novice taking her first steps into the world. This crime was far too sophisticated and vicious for someone like her to see through at a glance.
And from the glimpse of her face I caught at a distance, it was written all over her: Wow, I just took a few pictures and walked around and already made two hundred thousand? Absolute jackpot! That pure, empty-headed look only someone who'd lived under the same roof with her for a while could read at a glance.
Ah, screw it! If talking won't work, the body will!
Law, rules — none of it mattered. In the end I decided to force a frontal assault with this tiny beast's body. I loaded power into my legs and launched off the ground like a spring.
"Ah — a cat!!!"
Yuyeon's startled cry rang through the alley. I shot between her legs like the wind, and before she could even reach for me I clamped my sharp front teeth hard around the cash envelope jammed under the outdoor unit. Luckily there wasn't so much money inside that I couldn't hold it in my mouth.
"No, kitty!"
She still didn't seem to realize it was me — Nabi.
Envelope in my jaws, I tore down the street.
Police... I had to find the police.
People might curse them and call them pigs, but right now the only ones who could fix this situation were the cops. Nobody else would help. If Yuyeon was going to stay out of prison, this was the only way.
"Myaah!"
I ran with everything I had.