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Half an hour ago, I received a phone call from a number I didn't recognise in Plymouth. It was a recorded message stating that two sums of money had been removed from my account this morning (£1,300 and £400) by Amazon and to press 1 if this was by me and 2 if it wasn't. Naturally I hung up at this point, but felt it wise to ring my bank just to confirm that no transactions had taken place. The bank contact confirmed that everything was OK and that several customers had reported the same scam. Not so long ago, another phone call from an Indian sounding chap told me that my Internet had been compromised and I needed his expensive software fix to resolve it. Then before that, there were a couple of text messages threatening me with gaol because my Nat Ins number was used fraudulently or because I had been avoiding paying tax.
Needless to say, all of these scams were ignored by me and nothing untoward has happened.
This got me thinking about scams in the good old days before widespread Internet use and online banking etc.
I can recall receiving a couple of letters talking about some distant relative who had died in Canada and who had left me $1.2 million. All I had to do was to send the administrators a 1% handling fee and the money was mine!
There was also that win in the American lottery, which was mine to claim - after a few hundred dollars processing fee of course! The fact that I have no relatives in Canada and the only foreign lottery I ever entered was in France, reduced the credibility of these letters to something below zero. Such scams obviously do succeed on some people though, otherwise they wouldn't still exist.
Anyone else have experience of scams - either recent or in the mists of time?
Needless to say, all of these scams were ignored by me and nothing untoward has happened.
This got me thinking about scams in the good old days before widespread Internet use and online banking etc.
I can recall receiving a couple of letters talking about some distant relative who had died in Canada and who had left me $1.2 million. All I had to do was to send the administrators a 1% handling fee and the money was mine!
There was also that win in the American lottery, which was mine to claim - after a few hundred dollars processing fee of course! The fact that I have no relatives in Canada and the only foreign lottery I ever entered was in France, reduced the credibility of these letters to something below zero. Such scams obviously do succeed on some people though, otherwise they wouldn't still exist.
Anyone else have experience of scams - either recent or in the mists of time?
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