Come Thursdays, and my email fills with unwanted spam. Last week I got a couple from Norton Security sent from two different sites reminding me it’s time to pay their annual subscription (I have never in my life used Norton). The kosher version of this company functions precisely as a spam-buster. Their messages also say I ‘can unsubscribe’ by clicking on something or other; thank you, most kind, I think not.
Microsoft also reaches out, again twice, from two different and rather odd sounding addresses, neither of which appear on their proper webpage – no doubt an oversight on their part. Again, I block them (‘submit as Spam’), but they will return (probably next Thursday – I wonder, possibly this day has an extra significance in Albania?).
Then there was a special deal on a memory-foam pillow. I’m retired. I already have a fucking pillow.
I got a too-good-to-refuse offer on my ‘auto-insurance’, an Omaha Steak gourmet sampler box (no charge), a free mystery parcel from the American post office (!), a cure for Alzheimers from Bill Gates and a message which assures me that ‘my wife says I’ve never had sex like this’.
Again, I can unsubscribe, but well, maybe I should go and get married first.
This is all designed to catch out the unwary.
What I do, what we all do, is mark it as ‘Spam’ and then wait for the next one.
Whatever happened to those exiled Nigerian princes who would kindly offer you half of five million piastres if they could just borrow your bank account for a few days?
Also on Thursday last week – what a day it was! – a message arrived that very evening from my bank to tell me that it was going to pay on my behalf to another bank which I have never dealt with the unlikely sum of 1,982.44€ within the hour and could I ring this number if I wasn’t in agreement… No, I could not.
The next day, the lady at the bank told me that it hadn’t come from them. There’s a surprise.
I got several bothersome phone calls on Thursday as well. No one rings any more – they send you a WhatsApp instead. Now these calls, and I’ve blocked loads of them, come from Madrid or Valladolid or Lichtenstein and they want to sell me something. ‘Hola’, they say, ‘buenas tardes. Mi nombre es-’, but by then I’ve already hung up the phone.
All this, and I’m on the Lista Robinson (created precisely to stop these calls) and besides, the Government has just made these call-centres illegal. Maybe the word hasn’t got through yet.
These days, one is always doing something more rewarding than waiting for a phone call. In my case it was driving (try and get the phone out of your trouser pocket while wearing a seat-belt) or having a siesta and dreaming about how I was going to surprise my future wife.
A useful site called Maldita keeps an eye out on scams. I was reading about how somebody sends you a message on WhatsApp about an earthquake and how you should link to such and such a page which, says the item, will clear out your phone in under ten seconds!
On Facebook last… yes dammit, it was also on Thursday… a series of adverts appeared with the Spanish king trying to sell me a get-rich-quick scheme. Then one from the head of the Banco de Santander, then another with both of them. I wrote to the Facebook poohbahs and said it was a scam and they thanked me for my nice letter, but that the adverts were fine and dandy. Old Mark Chuckleburg must need the money.
I remember last summer there was another Fb scam, where you and nine others received a message about a car-crash and an ‘Oh The Horror! Click here for details’.
I checked with Google AI and got: ‘Spam bypasses filters because spammers constantly evolve tactics—using new domains, rotating IP addresses, and embedding text within images to evade detection. Filters cannot be perfectly restrictive without blocking legitimate emails, and sophisticated spam often masks itself as legitimate, personalized, or "important" content to bypass automated AI-based filters’.
It was almost a relief to hear from a poor French-woman today who was caught by one of those hugger-muggers (Eastern Europeans who wisely avoid stealing from Spaniards). She lost her thief-proof Cartier watch in a tris-tras which, the husband told me, he himself couldn’t have removed from her wrist in less than a minute.
And thus we continue, one eye on our purse, as the world turns.
What’s that? Trump’s dead? Click on this link.