Letters to the editor: Scamming the scammers

Scam victim Brian Cotter thanks a computer consultant for scamming a scammer in today's Letters to the Editor. Photo/file

Scamming the scammers

With acknowledgement to the late Sir Edmund - We got the bastards!
Well, at least Eden Brackstone of Queenstown did (Otago Daily Times, January 18). Congratulations to him and full marks on scamming the scammer. Just yesterday I received another phone call from one of the residents in our village thanking me for lifting the lid on the "Spark" scammers (News, November 20). She had just received a call from them and recalled my experience. I now say, on behalf of an enormous number of people, Thank you, Eden!
Brian Cotter
Mount Maunganui

Testing reflexes

A conspiritorist I am not. However, I cannot help but think that the recent Hawaiian nuclear warning was not an accident but a deliberate action to test the reflexes and attitudes of the civilian population and the efficiency of the civil defence.
That being the case, well done the button pusher.
Did he have a wink, wink from a higher authority or did he do it as the ultimate act of devilment? There will be an inquiry, and the findings will hang some poor, hourly- paid clerk and absolve the higher authority on some convoluted reasoning that no one can fathom and therefore no one can blame.
How would we, in any one of our regional electorates, fare in a similar situation? That is providing that the warning devices all worked and the Civil Defence top people were all awake, unlike a few years ago when the Hawaiian tsunami centre could not raise anyone.
Just wondering.
AD Kirby
Papamoa

Littering's wider effect

Am I missing something or is this just another attempt by Matakana Island people to control the whole island?
It clearly states in the Bay of Plenty Times (News, January 17) that the "Panepane end of Matakana Island is owned by the Western Bay District Council" and whether you take issue with that fact or not does not do away with the public's rights to use that end of Matakana Island freely. Which includes passengers from cruise boats or whatever vessel moors at that wharf.
If you'd like the history and stories of the area which you claim to be ancestral to be made more available to visitors to the island to make them more aware of their surroundings, why not arrange for a special booklet on this area and its significance to your hapu, and distribute this information to the cruise boats and info sites so that visitors to the Panepane end of Matakana Island can be suitably informed.
However, it's not just this wharf and area that is being misused. People in general, not only cruise boat passengers or day-trippers, need to be made more aware of how littering affects our environment and oceans. Not just on Matakana Island.
Isabel Ashmore
Tauranga