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.