As weeks go, this has been the stuff of legend. Lady Luck, whoever she is, has been smiling on me as the good news has piled up, mainly in the form of freebies – and who doesn’t like freebies? But there was some truly great news which has, quite literally, saved my life. Sort of.
I have been bombarded with gifts from Boots, Screwfix (an entire box of tools, thanking me for my loyalty, despite the fact that I have never set foot in one of their stores or bought anything from them), M&S (a free hamper) and B&Q (more loyalty gifts despite the fact I hate the place and avoid it in the same way I avoid clichés: like the plague). I have also had a life-saving message regarding my iClloud Storrage (sic) account informing me that all my photos and videos are going to be deleted. I am not an expert on ‘iClloud Storrage’ and seem to have been misspelling ‘iClloud Storrage’ right from the start, but no matter. All I had to do was send off my full name and banking details and everything would be hunky dory. Fantastic. And, to quote Tess Daly on Strictly, the results are in:
- None of my free gifts have arrived yet, but you know what the Royal Mail is like these days! It’s surely only a matter of time?
- All my photos and videos are still there! Thank you iClloud Storrage, especially to evanbush415@bzaphmdc.biz who must be the member of the iClloud Storrage team dealing with matters like this. What a relief!
While I am waiting for my free gifts to arrive, I shall be sort out what appears to be a glitch with my bank. It has been normal practice for me to keep at least a fiver in my account to avoid the need for having an overdraft, but today I find that I am £20,000 overdrawn. I put this down to incompetence in the online service. In the old days, I could have simply walked to my local branch and sorted things out. This morning, there will be hell to pay.
Alternatively, I may not have responded to any of these scam emails on the very simple grounds that if something appears to be too good to be true, then it usually is.
I do not know whether I have been specifically targeted on account of being a doddery old person with declining faculties but if the scammers were watching me on the 10th and 11th holes on the local Par Three golf course on Wednesday, they might properly have concluded I was well on the way to decrepitude. Not only was I hacking drives, fluffing chips and missing simple putts, I was cursing at above average volume. “Hmm,” thought the scammers. “Let’s send him a few emails. He’s proper doolally.”
I would imagine that the motive of anyone who does reply to an obvious scam is simple: greed. It is why folk piss away their savings to soft spoken scammers who are quite happy to ruin their lives and walk away into the sunset with a big fat Cuban cigar, smirking, “I got away with it again.”
I do not wish to sound like I am ridiculing everyone who has found themselves ripped off by unscrupulous criminals (because that is what they are). I should imagine that many of the scammed are more gullible than younger folk because they – we – begin to part with our marbles and brain cells and worse still develop cruel conditions like dementia, possibly unlocking hitherto unknown feelings of greed.
Just the other day, while taking a welcome break from attacking the Labour government, The Guardian ran a major story exposing how some of the scammers work, in this instance from from three office blocks in Tbilisi in Georgia. It’s so sad reading the stories of ripped off pensioners, whether they are being greedy or because their decaying brain makes it easier to fool them. And who’s to say that one day it might happen to me?
I am not being smug about any of this. A couple of years ago, one of my social media accounts was hacked into, briefly denying my access, as a direct result of me falling for a simple scam on messenger. It took a couple of highly stressful days to get my account back from the scammers but it certainly concentrated my mind and hopefully I have learned and will never forget the lessons.
When you play football, a golden rule for a defender is ‘if in doubt kick it out’. In the new world of tinternet, the same thing applies. My default position is that an unsolicited email is likely to be a scam and I work back from there. This may not be foolproof – and there is plenty of proof available to show that I am a fool – but it’s far better than hoping that every online communication is genuine from the start.
Mine is a cynical view of events, but I would suggest that the scammers are way beyond cynicism. They are positively evil and we owe it to ourselves and good folk everywhere to not fall for their scams and to try to ensure that those we know and love don’t get scammed, too. If it looks dodgy, then it is. Pass it on.
