Is there anyone more loathsome, lower than a lizard’s appendix scar, than a scammer?
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If only the cleverness, creativity and persistence used in scamming was put to good, we would have solved two-thirds of the planet’s problems by now.
There is a reason Down The Mall mentions this today – other than that the house phone went off again last night and it was the same old, same old: “Long static pause at the start Hello? How you are doing this evening Sir ….. CLUNK!)
Now, Consumer Affairs Victoria is pretty hot at identifying scams and helping people avoid them. Especially older - ahem, sensibly aged – people.
Next Tuesday, CAV is putting on a workshop alerting people to the tell-tales of scams. It’s on at 2-3pm at the Eaglehawk Library and is part of a series of workshops CAV is taking around regional Victoria. There’s another at the Castlemaine library on Thursday, 10-11am.
CAV offers a teaser about scams by putting up 10 real-life situations on its web page and asking if it’s a scam or not. How hard can it be, we thought? We got only seven of them. It is really worth a look.
Who would have thought a Nigerian prince didn’t want me to help him transfer $50 million to my bank account?
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It’s so confusing.
Bendigo Bank is also fierce about outing scammers, and we note an article from a few years ago when the bank helped bust an “elaborate car loans scam” operating out of Port Melbourne. It was alleged the company had come up with a scheme involving $12 million of fake car loans.
The trouble is, when you try to research that event by computer, the article pops up on screen surround by … five ads for car loans and six links to other car loan sites.
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Curiously, the word “scam” may itself be a scam. It appears out of the blue in the 1960s and although no-one claims to be certain of its history, it was such a good word that everyone seemed to instantly know what it meant.
Suggestions for its origins include American carnival slang, 16th Century French, a corruption of the English word scamp, old German etc. There is also a dark and vague suggestion the FBI was behind it.
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The Federal government’s Scamwatch service reports that so far this year, $50,986,730 is known to have been lost in 60,965 Australian scams. The most scammed were people over 65, and the device most used to rip them off was the telephone. Women were slightly more likely to report probable scams, but men were slightly more likely to lose bigger amounts.
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Being a gold-mining city where it’s often said there’s more money in paper than in gold, Bendigo has long been familiar with the use of the latest telecommunications technology to scam people.
Here’s one from April 1895. A manager from the Bendigo iron foundry, Roberts and Sons, was asked to go to Melbourne to meet an investor who wanted to build a quartz crushing battery.
When the Bendigo bloke turned up at the Collins Street office where the meeting was to take place, there was no appearance from the Melbourne “investor” who sent a telegram saying he’d been delayed and making a later time to meet.
Our Bendigo chap waited, but there was still no appearance, so he caught the train home, when his iron foundry office clerk reported that he’d received the boss’ telegraph and had acted on it.
It said: “Contract signed” and ordered the immediate telegraph transfer of £46.
The Age opened its report with the view that the poor Bendigo company had been defrauded by “a skilful piece of rascality.”