One of my true heroes is Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis. To my mind, he is the best of us. His tireless consumer work on behalf of The Great British Public has made him very wealthy and quite right, too. The fact that he is ‘only’ Martin Lewis CBE and not, at the very least, Sir Martin Lewis or even Lord Lewis, makes a mockery of the mockery that is our honours system, at the same time as businessmen and women and third rate politicians attract gongs apparently because they are part of the uniform. Yet, according to this interview, Lewis himself believes he is losing the battle with scammers. If he is losing the battle, what price the rest of us?
I use technology a great deal in my life, although I am far from an expert. I like to think I have a decent level of understanding of what’s real and make believe and how to manage the modern world, but as I have been reminded in recent days, I am as fallible as anyone else.
Just yesterday, I managed to sign up to Amazon Prime, even though I didn’t realise I’d done it. More importantly, I didn’t intend to sign up, primarily because these days I try to use Amazon as little as possible. I am strongly opposed to owner Jeff Bezos’s support for Donald Trump, I object to the monopoly-type behemoth Amazon has become and I don’t like the way it treats its workers. In fact, I only realised I had ‘signed-up’ this morning when I got an email telling me they’d be taking my first instalment for Prime in a few weeks. The rigmarole I went through to cancel the service was, I feel, designed to be as difficult as possible.
It was similarly as awkward to cancel my annual subscription to The Guardian, incredibly fiddly to renew my annual membership to a local music venue (failed) and to book a medical appointment (also failed). It could well be my failing faculties are at least partly responsible but it seems like these things are done in order to make life as complicated as possible.
My first reaction to the horror scam stories reported on by Lewis was the usual: how could people be so gullible? But then, when I think about my own difficulties, including a couple of years ago when I fell for a scam which saw my Facebook account hacked (I later retrieved it, but it was somewhat stressful), and I know that at some level we are all vulnerable.
Many of the scams employ AI, something I am very wary of. As we know, in terms of AI, we are still somewhere in the Stone Age and soon it will be everywhere. Even now, social media is full of AI imagery and videos posted by people who, I suspect not always knowingly, share them with ‘friends’. But look at what has happened with Martin Lewis himself, where scammers have used his image to steal from innocent people. If it can happen to Britain’s finest ambassador for protecting consumers, it doesn’t make me feel too clever.
I stand by the old adage that if something appears to be too good to be true, then it probably is. Worse than that, my first reaction to most correspondence, especially the unsolicited stuff, these days is to start from the position that it could be a scam. If the smartest bloke in the land – Martin Lewis – thinks the scammers, who he rightly points out are organised criminals, are winning, we’re in a much worse situation that I realised.
