OPINION:
The world was an untrustworthy place this week. Someone tried to email-scam me, I got ripped off by a taxi driver, and the cat bit me while it was still purring.
There are so many horrible scams out there these days, fake house painters defrauding pensioners, people claiming your computer is broken, sea monkeys.
I know of one gentleman whose defence against scammers whenever they ring, is to say cheerily, “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t speak English and I don’t have a phone”, and then hang up. I like to imagine the scammer then spends a couple of quiet moments trying to work through the logic of what he just said.
My scammage began when I got a desperate email begging for my financial help, supposedly from one of my comedian mates. I immediately knew it wasn’t him, because the grammar was way off, and it didn’t end with an inappropriate joke. Also, the comedy festival was only a month ago, and it mentioned nothing about how well his show had done, so it was clearly a fake.
The email started: “My family and I made a trip to (Ukraine)” with “Ukraine” beautifully in parenthesis, as if replacing the phrase “insert name of troubled faraway country here”, like they’d copied it straight from
