Godfrey's Gospel: There’s no end to the ingenuity of scammers

I LOVE and loathe ‘new’ technology in equal measure. Nowadays, we cannot live without it, but how I often long for the days when everything was much slower and, maybe, that little bit more personal.

The days of writing a cheque are a thing of the past. I have a few left in an old cheque book, which I have kept for nostalgic reasons, but if I did present one for payment, unless I was lucky enough to meet someone of my own age, I doubt if the person receiving it would even know what it was.

No doubt businesses are glad that cheques are outdated. While most people doing the writing of said cheques were acting in the best interests of all concerned, there were those who knew when putting pen to paper that the cheque wasn’t worth a curse and would bounce from here to the Moon and back again.

In other words, when a business was making a lodgement, they were really taking a leap of faith that all the cheques they were lodging to their account were good. In turn, they wrote cheques on the strength of that, but all it took was a few to fall at their end and suddenly their credit rating or reputation was at risk.

Nowadays, it is swipe on the phone, insert or tap the card or carry out an EFT (electronic funds transfer, to those of you not in the know) and, hey presto, the money is gone from your account and into the account of the recipient. We know it hasn’t actually gone there, but in banking circles it means the money is gone from your account and will end up in the account of whoever you have designated as the recipient.

All very fast and clean – or so you would hope ‒ but with all that advancement comes an equally annoying problem: scamming.

On two occasions last week, I received what appeared at first glance to be innocuous notifications, one from Paypal and the other from someone purporting to represent my bank.

The first said PayPal feared a transaction for over €600, which I had authorised, was a scam, which they withheld, but I was to immediately contact their customer services department to clarify matters. Wow, fair play to PayPal – at least someone there was on the ball and looking out for my best interests. But hold on … I don’t have a PayPal account and I haven’t spent €600-plus on anything for months, so why are they contacting me?

I may be slow and at times people have even called me stupid, but on this occasion I was neither. That notification hit the bin and the number was blocked on my mobile. However, I have since learned that blocking the number, while it may have given me a sense of pay-back, didn’t really solve the problem because whoever is running this scam will randomly pick another phone number out of their arsenal and send the same message over and over again.

I got the same treatment from someone purporting to be acting on behalf of Revolut and again I kept dumping the message and blocking the number until whoever was running that scam switched to PayPal and, yes, you are looking at one of the very few people who doesn’t have a Revolut card to help me spend the few bob that I have – I can do that without any help from anyone, thank you very much.

But the attempted scam I got from my ‘alleged’ bank was a little different. This came in the form of a text message. It looked fairly harmless, as all it was doing was informing me that they had, on my request, added a payee to my account and even went as far as to provide the name. However, if by chance that name was incorrect, there was a mobile number I could phone to verify or cancel matters.

Thankfully, I didn’t dial the number because I was later told the phone number was really masquerading and, indeed, was the link the scammers needed me to activate in order for them to gain access to my bank account. Not that they would have found a lot to play around with if they had, but what’s mine is mine and I would really prefer to spend it rather than have it land in someone else’s account and then disappear.

That happened to me a few years ago when, having withdrawn money from an ATM machine on Tullow Street on Christmas Eve, I went shopping for groceries as soon as shops reopened the day after St Stephen’s Day, only to discover there had been six transactions on my account – in Puerto Rico.

I have never been known to move at any great speed, but I doubt even a superhero could have made that journey – with planes grounded for the holidays – in three days. Thankfully, the bank also recognised that fact and quickly refunded every penny to me.

On another occasion, in Kildare Village, I purchased an item costing €35, but the following day I received a call from the shop advising me that they had accidentally added a zero to the transaction. They had ‘instantly’ refunded me the entire amount – but that ‘instant’ really meant it would be at least three days before I again had access to my own money.

I know shopping online can be a godsend when you can order and pay in an instant with little effort and all from the comfort of your armchair, but then we hear the horror stories of people losing thousands at the hands of scammers and wish for a less stressful time when cash was king.

Ask tourists who were in Spain or Portugal in April during the massive power blackout when nothing worked. No cash registers, no bank machines, no tapping, nothing. They soon found out cash is still king.