Boom goes the scam business

If it looks or sounds too good to be true then it probably is too good to be true.

Now there's a well-worn expression - and an expression rolled out to me this week by three different people.

Two had been recipients of rather startling news (a big win in a lottery) and one was a member of the Eastern District Police crew who has collected and collated a remarkable spread of mailed and emailed lottery wins, dodgy fine repayments and appeals from friends overseas who urgently need some cash because they've just been robbed.

Twenty or so years ago scams were pretty well confined to ridiculous letters from Nigeria asking recipients to allow their bank account to be a vehicle for disposing of a few million bucks left by some chief or statesman who had no family.

Ridiculous, but they actually snared a few people.

Then the unsolicited letters started arriving from places like Spain and Greece declaring that lucky old you had won a share of several hundred thousand dollars and all you had to do to claim it was ...you know the rest ... just a few simple bank account details.

Over the past decade the scam game has effectively become a global business, and with the great leap in online social and business media, and the development of cellular phone sophistication, the appeals and offers and demands just flow as freely as every other tweet, blog and app.

If it's not a lottery win they'll hit your plastic cards by doctoring ATMs or ploughing through online banking and purchasing sites looking for that one tiny key that will access a vault.

A couple of recent additions to the growing file of dodgy approaches held by people like crime prevention adviser Paul Miller are very slick ones - polished and shiny cards and brochures with email and phone contacts confidently portrayed.

One reader who called this week in the wake of reading a scam story said he called the number out of curiosity and was bluntly told not to ring again, but email instead - so he said "no way" and hung up.

Yep, what better way to get into a computer far away?

And the day after the story ran I received two calls, from a private number, on my cellphone.

A foreign chap was telling me he could help with phone and computer work for "very small cost".

I said, "Go away," and hung up.

But three minutes later he called again.

So this time I gave myself the title of Detective Sergeant and said to him, "Just stay on the line."

He hung up.

They are out there, folks, and they are hunting.

In finishing, I suggest you just go back to the first sentence again.