People of Drayton Valley beware! It’s not just rural crime that’s the problem. Sometimes it seems like there’s a whole world of bad guys lining up to try to take our hard earned cash.
On an average day selected at random (in this case the day was last Tuesday, fact fans) my e mail account received a total of 32 messages which were more or less what you’d define as spam. They weren’t necessarily all criminal; some of them appear to be genuine, albeit misguided, attempts to cure my male pattern and address my chronic lack of cheap toner cartridges. But most of them were clearly some kind of scam. They all seem to fall into one of the following categories.
- You’ve won a lottery you didn’t actually enter.
- You’re asked by a soldier in the Middle East /the account manager at an overseas bank/the daughter of a deceased foreign politician, to help them get money out of the country in exchange for a wad of cash so thick you could choke on it.
- Someone named Chesty Marmalade has seen your picture on Facebook, thinks you’re cute and would like to be friends.
- You owe money to the Canada Revenue Agency. If you don’t send it to them in the form of an Apple gift card then the police will be at your door to cart you off to somewhere less than pleasant. Then you’ll be sorry.
The best thing to do is to simply delete those messages. Although before I was married I really wouldn’t have minded getting to know Chesty if she ever decided to give up her life of crime and settle down with a fat guy she’d never met. But some scams are a little more persistent. A while ago I got a call from a very nice man claiming he was from Microsoft. He said they’d detected something wrong with our computer and if I’d just follow a few simple steps . . . well, you can guess the rest. The whole thing is a con, of course. They tell you there’s a virus on your machine and they’ll fix it for you. Then they either get you to pay for removing a virus that wasn’t there to begin with, or they try to get access to the computer itself. If you ever get a call like that, hang up. Microsoft will not call you unless you have contacted them. Not ever. They are too busy making money.
So, based on a not very scientific survey, conducted at my house, by me, computer related crime is all over the place and it’s spreading like spilled merlot across the crisp white table cloth of life.
Is this time to panic? Are we about to be subsumed by a wave of criminal geniuses? Well, probably not. All the multiple scams are the work of a surprisingly small group of people. And people like that have always been out there. It’s just that these days, they’re a little more technologically advanced. Modern telecommunications have led every criminal in the world to our doorstep right here in Drayton Valley. They’re lining up to see how gullible you are. The trick is not to let them in.
