Ask the plain question.

Do not send money you cannot verify.

Say the number out loud.

Let the people whose job it is do their jobs, and do not try to fix an active fraud with your own hands, or your own savings, or your parents’.

I am a data analyst.

I find the one figure in the column that does not reconcile.

For a few weeks the wrong figure was a man in Dubai, and the right figure was the one that had taken me years to build and was now, again, sitting exactly where I had left it.

I closed the blue folder.