Scammers, Scumbags, and Scunthorpe (nice place, actually. Possibly.)

I see the free-holiday con-merchants have crept out from under their stone again, and are now operating from an accommodation address in Blackpool, phoning you up at tea-time to offer you unmissable deals and free hollies, which turn out to be 20 minutes Sunday shopping in Scunthorpe if you will just spend fifty million quid on a timeshare apartment in eg Afghanistan to qualify.

One of the great benefits of the internet age is that scams like this are so easily spotted, because they are publicised on the web by ordinary people who don’t like being made fools of. So get their ‘company’ name and/or phone number when they ring you, make an excuse to keep them hanging on, and Google what information you have, plus the keyword SCAM.  It is surprising how many con-artists fail to take obvious precautions, like blocking their phone number.  Scammers might be cunning, but they are also as thick as any other purse-snatcher
or dark-alley mugger.

This particular scam is well-documented (Google 01253206449 and you’ll see what I mean), and that is fine for us net-wise savvies.  We leave the phone dangling for 48 hours and let them pick up the bill, or we ask a friend in Auckland, NZ, to send them a very large parcel of housebricks  by air freight, without a stamp on.

But I reserve my real anger, fury, rage and calumny against Scammers Anonymous because of Granny Oldbotham and Great-Uncle Wilf, who wouldn’t know a computer from a coprolite (which when abused it closely resembles), and who only had the electric telephone put in at all because the family wanted them to feel safe.  It’s grans and grandads and other elderly people who are most likely to be suckered by these predators, this new generation of cowboy builders in cyberspace with a BT line. And yes, BT, you have a lot to answer for, ethically if not legally, and so do the banks who allow known crooks to have bulging accounts with them,  'banking' and 'ethics' being nouns which have never yet been known to occur together in the same chapter or paragraph, let alone sentence, the love of money being what it is biblically reported to be.)

I thought I was net-wise, but I still got conned out of nearly £200 nearly two years ago by a fake internet trader.  Appalling as it might seem, and despite everything that trading standards departments know about him, he was still operating, or he was until a couple of days ago, at


www.computerwebstore.co.uk


(which mercifully is now offline, it seems)


and he must have made millions of pounds by now out of suckers like me.  But he’s a Liverpool crook, well known to police and trading standards, so rather than tangle with him and find our house burned down in the middle of the night with us in it, we backed off, to my eternal shame.  So he could still be operating under a new name, and you could be ordering that new telly at an absurdly low price off him at this very minute. Bye-bye wallet.


There are reptiles out there, disguised as humans.  Just watch it when they offer you a bite out of their apple.  That's when the problems started.

Direct Action Plan, File Ref aab/112/x/22.7 Annex 12.3

There’s been a lot of grumbling in our little bit of Over Wyre lately, and we’re not used to grumbling, but really!  No sooner have the Yanks who wanted to inject 50bn tonnes of gas at high pressure under our houses pulled out than another lot of anxiety-inducing erberts muscle in.  I mean, you can’t relax for a minute. I haven’t dared put  my slippers on since 1965.

I don’t usually go in for conspiracy theories, despite having the largest collection of X-Files DVDs outside MI5 and the CIA, but I am beginning to get just the teeniest bit neurotic, and I am noticing the sulphurous whiff of a Cunning Plan.

My suspicions were first aroused when Wyre BC gave permission for a derelict building to be erected on what used to be a rather nice bowling green by the side of the historic Bourne Arms.  Then this morning the massive concrete plinth that had just been put up by the side of the mobile phone shop (whey-hey, we’ve got a mobile phone shop in Knotty End!) wasn’t there.  Spirited away in the middle of the night by Persons Unknown.  Derelict building still there, though.  But nice new plinth to commemorate the Battle of Britain conspicuously not there no more, our Ada.

It’s all because we’re Over the River, and not really part of civilisation as it is understood in Big Brash Blackpool or Poulton-le-Fylde-Under-P.  It is all designed to drive us out, so as to declare Knotty End a Site of No Scientific Or Any Other Interest Whatsoever, and then do what councils always do with derelict land – flog it to a manufacturer of land mines or turn it into a giant municipal pig farm or landfill site.

Well, chums, the people who live round here have been here for generations.  They all have ancestors who survived on one Morecambe Bay shrimp a year, and gave the left-overs to the people in the hut next door, and they’re as tough as old boots, and they last even longer.  And one didn’t do one’s stint in planning departments for nothing, neither did one take on Mrs T and her government without learning a thing or two about dirty dancing, so here’s slopping the slurry  -  the Action Plan, absolutely guaranteed to win funding from the NWDA, because it’s called an Action Plan.

First thing, we declare UDI and lay tons of chewing gum along Shard Bridge.  Really really sticky chewing gum. That closes the border. We then write a letter to Lancaster  City Council that starts “Dear Daddy.”  I have read up on local government law in back issues of the Gazette (not you, Sir, the legal one) and that’s considered to be the proper way to address a potential adoptive parent, just take my word for it.

We then get in touch with the people who nicked all the lead off the roof of St Oswald’s last year, and tip them off about the derelict luxury-flat Oedipus complex by the jetty, and go 50/50 on the proceeds, which we offer to Lancaster as a b    , oops, I mean as a generous gift with no strings attached.

Result? Well, absolutely nothing, probably.  But isn’t it nice to rattle your cage a bit, just for the fun of it? If it makes enough noise somebody might hear.

Spam, Spam, no thank you, Ma'am

In the last week alone well-meaning 'friends' have seized more than 50MB of my hard disk with viruses that they have unwittingly passed on. These viruses were uninvited.  They weren't the sort that would wipe your C: drive clean or empty your bank account, true, but they behave like viruses because they take up bandwidth, thus clogging up the Internet and slowing it down, and they proliferate exponentially at the speed of light.


The villains are most girlie net-virgins who just reely reely have to pass on to their entire address book the latest bit of round-robin feel-good or feel-guilty drivel that tickled them.


I've tried everything.  I've done polite replies asking them not to include me in the list of recipients for the latest version of frog in a blender or why immigrants are bleeding the country dry.  I've tried suggesting to them that some of this stuff actually breaks the law because it tends to incite racial hatred.  I've tried subtlety - saying 'oh gosh! How amusing! I really must pass your hilarious antisemitic joke and 10MB of jpgs on to some of my Jewish friends.'  Nothing works.


There are two last resorts.  The obvious one is to block them so that I will never receive anything from them again, but this way lies social fragmentation and no Christmas cards, ever.  And nobody would ever speak to anybody else ever again.  The other is to send them a bill.  What we need is a net-clamping agency.  £100 to unlock your e-mail account for abuse of the privilege of free speech, and don't do it again.


Meanwhile, I will once again spend a couple of hours cleaning out all the uninvited hi-res jpgs from the dark corners of the hard disk, where they lurk.  What I can't do is clean out of the heads of the people who send this sad stuff to me their opinion of me - they think I think the same way as them. 


And I rather hope that I don't.