Good Old Fraud

It never ceases to surprise me just how amateurish so many attempts at fraud, hacking and virus spreading and the like are on the internet. On my academic e-mail address I have just received an e-mail from a Mr. Assou (really! truth is always stanger than fiction!) in Ghana who it seems works in a mine and has lots of gold dust to sell cheap if I can just send him my bank details. How can I resist?

Well at least it makes a change from the Nigerian lawyers who want to cut me in on a share of some huge unclaimed legal estate if I can just cover their court costs and let them know the number of my Swiss bank account.

Does anyone anywhere ever fall for this stuff? Presumably someone, somewhere must have in the past or they wouldn't bother. One in ten million perhaps.

I can understand people getting more confused by all these pishing e-mails purporting to be from banks, or inviting us to 'click on the link' that will activate our 'free subscripton' to the 'Cat Journal' or confirm our acceptance of a new three piece suite. But most people have got pretty wary now eh?

In Japan there's been a spate of phone calls to usually elderly people on the pretense that their grandson or grandaughter has been involved in causing a car accident - but a rapid payment of a large sum of money into an account can resolve the problem. Such is the sense of family loyalty here that the banks now won't permit individual payments over a certain amount (around £500) to stop so many naive relatives being fleeced.

The only e-mail that has got the better of me so far was one purporting to be a free subscription to 'Marxist Weekly'. Huh? In a second I'd clicked on the 'cancellation link' at the bottom and - VIRUS ATTACK! Luckily my virus protection software stopped it.

So be careful! If you don't believe me click here!