Police advise we shouldn’t hand over any items we’re selling online until we’ve been paid. Photo: ACT Policing.
A friend received a call from someone who told her she was his long-lost cousin. They had the same double-barrelled surname so it had to be true.
He lived in an African country, she lived on the other side of his world.
But, as it happened, her surname was made up of her maiden name and her married name – so unless there were three of them in that relationship, it looked, smelled and was clearly a scam.
He probably didn’t want much. Just all her valuables – with the exception of her children – bank account details and most of Tasmania. She just wanted him to go away.
Have you noticed how much smarter these scammers have become? Or are we becoming more stupid, greedy or just want more people in our lives with the same names?
Most of us want to think we’re way too smart for these scammers but, to be honest, how can you compete with someone with no conscience?
How do they sleep when their day job is ripping off people who have less than nothing to live on? Their night job? Dark web stuff. Don’t want to delve anywhere remotely near that.
How do you get into scamming, I’d like to know. Is there a school for it? If there’s a university for making chips, sorry, fries, maybe there’s one for sociopaths. Probably not, they know they’re smarter than the rest of us already and don’t care what we think anyway.
Do they sit there, in their brown raincoats inside, combed-over hair, hunched over their computers, just tapping out plans to be nasty – and richer? Or have I been watching too much bad TV?
Police talk about villains looking like everyone else. You’ve seen it on the news. When something awful happens at a place where something awful almost never happens, there’s always at least one neighbour, usually pixilated for fear of reprisal, saying on camera that they were very quiet neighbours, never had any idea anything was wrong.
No, scammers don’t usually put up signs on the front door saying: Do Not Disturb, I am in the midst of ripping someone vulnerable of their life savings. Please call back later – so I can ruin your life too.
Then there are the scammers who want you to believe they are the good guys. No, not the folk who sell you white goods at the best prices – really good guys who wear capes, jump in bounds from single buildings – or perhaps even the other way around – and are here just to save you from people who want to scam you. Just give them your bank account details, to be on the safe side.
So who do we trust? Well, no-one really. It used to be that the villains would wear clothes that gave them away, like three-piece-suits to the beach, new RM Williams boots in dusty paddocks or budgie smugglers, anywhere. Now mostly only politicians do that.
So it’s really hard to tell the goodies from the baddies these days. We need someone who wears their underpants on the outside to come and save us, again, ideally, in a single bound.
But then there are those who think they can trump everything and everyone. Now that’s just too bad to believe. If ever there were a scam … .
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