Tetherd Cow Ahead

‘Single mum fleeced of $8700 through Nigerian eBay scam.’

So screams the headline in this story from The Melbourne Age this morning, the exclamation mark surely struck off only minutes before it went to press.

When I started reading the article I had sympathy for the ‘single mum’ in question – apparently she’d been attempting to sell a PlayStation on eBay when she fell for a scam involving ‘paying for the shipping costs’ of the Nigerian buyer. Well, sure, to you and me even the very word ‘Nigerian’, when associated with the internet and monetary transactions, starts ringing alarm bells, but hey, not everyone out there in intertubes land is a savvy geek, right?

Those Nigerian bastards picking on our dinkum single mums! Why, I oughta…!

However, reading on, and picking out the threads of actual story from the sob story, I found my sympathy waning somewhat as the details emerged. It turns out that our poor single mum did in fact become suspicious of the transaction at some stage and contacted Consumer Protection, who told her in no uncertain terms to stop dealing with the fraudsters. She made her first major mistake at that point by completely disregarding the Consumer Protection advice and sending the Nigerians a copy of the email containing it.

Upon forwarding this email to the scammers, she then received fake emails back from them featuring WA ScamNet and WA government logos, which advised her to co-operate with Nigerian authorities.

The hoax escalated when the woman received a phony eBay email saying the case had been reported to Nigerian Police who then emailed her to say that the fraudster had been arrested.

Later, the fake police email told her that the courts and president of Nigeria had awarded her compensation amounting to $US250,000 ($278,000).

Aha. Now even the dimmest of us is stuffing cotton balls in his ears to drown out the clanging sound. It doesn’t take much to predict the next step. In order for our poor battling mum to get this $US250,000 she was asked to send the ‘Nigerian Government’ a ‘bank transfer fee’ of $US7000 so that the money could be ‘released’ to her.

I don’t know about you, but I just can’t see myself sending off a cool $7k to someone in Nigeria who I don’t know – someone whom I’ve never even heard of – on a promise, even if they do have a nice Nigerian Government letterhead. ((The matter of the SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLAR bank fee notwithstanding. It’s no wonder the Nigerians need money if their banks are screwing them that bad!)) But that’s exactly what Ms Single Mum went ahead and did. I think it’s reasonable to assume that she didn’t just have a spare $7k lying around the house, so she plainly went to some effort to round up the money. WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?! Well, I guess that was actually a rhetorical question – what she was thinking was ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I’m gonna be RICH on Nigerian money!!!’ ((Even though I don’t want to seem to be endorsing these Nigerian scamsters, you really have to admire how they’re evolving. Now that they realise that everyone is onto their scam they’re turning the scam itself into a scam. ‘The Nigerian government is SO distressed at all the problems caused by these terrible terrible scammers that we really want to give you money to compensate you!’))

Apparently, once the situation became plain she told Consumer Protection staff she felt ‘violated’ by the scam, but I suggest that what she really felt violated by was the realization that her own greed had gotten her into deep shit. People! I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – if something on the internet (or anywhere) seems too good to be true, it probably is!

The real flub here, though, must fall in the laps of the press (again). What is it with the ‘victim’ story here? Who the fuck cares if the woman in question is a ‘single mum’ and what does it have to do with anything AT ALL? I guess a headline that says ‘Gullible & Greedy Aussie Woman Keeps Nigerian Scammers in Clover’ doesn’t tug the heartstrings quite as poignantly. The lesson for us all is surely not simply caveat emptor but is also writ clear in the wisdom of the great Lao-Tzu:

There is no greater calamity than lavish desire.
There is no greater curse than discontentment.
And there is no greater disaster than greed.

A man is in critical condition in Sydney after taking a dare to eat a slug, the ABC reports. The 21-year-old caught rat lungworm disease which is caused by Angiostrongylus cantonensis, a parasitic worm that is carried by slugs and snails.

Personally, I am all for letting natural selection take care of these things. Maybe he’ll come around here and lick my fungus.

Sometimes teh stoopid in the world is so profound that I fear alien civilizations from other galaxies will first detect us not via radio transmissions or atmospheric chemistry signatures, but by the massive volume of idiot particles that we radiate out into space.

Take this latest ‘health’ warning from Samsung advising viewers of the potential hazards involved with watching 3D television.

If you experience any of the following symptoms, immediately stop watching 3D pictures and consult a medical specialist: (1) altered vision; (2) lightheadedness; (3) dizziness; (4) involuntary movements such as eye or muscle twitching; (5) confusion; (6) nausea; (7) loss of awareness; (8) convulsions; (9) cramps; and/or (10) disorientation.

I don’t know about you, but I frequently experience symptoms 2 through 7 (especially 5 & 6) while viewing normal 2D television, so on a 3D tv I’d be hard-pressed figuring out whether they were being caused by the 3D effect or the program content.

The Samsung advisory goes on to suggest that it is a bad idea to watch 3D tv ‘if you are in bad physical condition, need sleep or have been drinking alcohol’ instantly alienating about 75% of their possible customers. It also advises that you should not ‘place your television near open stairwells, cables, balconies or other objects that may cause you to injure yourself’.

So, to clarify: don’t watch 3D tv at the top of an open stairwell whilst drunk and sleep-deprived. It’s not the alcohol, the lack of sleep or the plummet to the marble foyer that need worry you – it’s that woo-eee-ooo spooky 3D vision!

You have been warned!

(Everyone probably knows someone who needs the kind of warning issued by Samsung, and therefore also needs a Simple Graphics Man coffee mug from the TCA Shoppe. Send them one today and help them avoid a horrible disfigurement!)

Recently I had cause to send some money to a friend of mine in the UK. It was not a lot – $150 reimbursement for a few pairs of trousers he’d had made for me in Vietnam. I wanted to make it easy for him, since he’d done me a big favour, so I thought I’d transfer it directly into his bank account and make sure I covered all his costs.

Off I went to my bank – one of Australia’s biggest and oldest establishments – gave them the details and asked them to do the deed.

Teller: It will cost you $28

Me: Oh well, I guess I expected it to be overly expensive, go ahead then.

Teller: What do you mean?

Me: Well, $28 for you to punch in a few numbers and do a transfer directly from my account into another account seems pretty excessive, but I expect that’s how you make your money. Go ahead.

Teller: That’s what it costs – the bank doesn’t make anything out of it.

Me: Oh, right. You’re telling me that this $28 doesn’t go to the bank, but is the cost of digital bits flitting across the internet to the UK?

Teller: Do you want to see the manager?

Me [sigh]: No, I’ll pay it, just go ahead.

She punches away at the terminal keyboard.

Teller: There’s a $250 minimum.

Me [incredulous]: What?

Teller: I can’t send $150. It’s $250 minimum.

Me: What? You’re telling me that right now, at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, you, a major bank, can’t send $150 from my account to my friend’s bank account in the UK?

Teller: I can, but there’s a $250 minimum.

Me: And it will cost me $28 on top of that?

Teller: Yes

Me: So, let me get this straight: to send my friend $150 using my own banking service – the bank where I have had an account for over 30 years – I actually have to fork out $278 or you can’t do it?

Teller: Do you want to see the manager?

Me: Yes, I want to see the manager.

The teller goes and talks to a bald headed guy in another office (I can see them through a big glass window). He looks at me and goes back to some paperwork. He sees me see him look at me. The teller returns.

Teller: He’ll be with you in five minutes.

Me: What? I’m supposed to wait five minutes so I can make a complaint? In five minutes, I’m pretty sure I’ll have worked out another way to do this and you’ll have lost a customer. Does that concern you at all?

Teller: [Shrugs]

I leave. I drive home. I find that my friend has a PayPal account. I facepalm myself for not having thought of that in the first place. I transfer the money. It costs me nothing.

Later that day, when I’m doing some net banking, I log out of my account and am farewelled with this message:

Astonished? I think I can say that they completely fulfilled their service promise!

Tetherd Cow Ahead celebrates World Homeopathy Awareness Week!

Well Acowlytes, I bet you didn’t think I could do it. I bet you didn’t think I could tie our old friends from ShooTag into homeopathy awareness week! But we have a saying around these parts: ‘Any man is liable to err but only a fool persists in error’. ((Cicero)) And with that thought in mind, a search on ‘Energetic Solutions’ (the company behind ShooTag) and ‘homeopathy’ throws up this link. ((Which shows us also that pet owners aren’t the only stupid people that these swindlers have gulled))

Yes folks, the people who brought you ShooTag, started out by attempting to foist on the world ‘homeopathic creams for stress reduction’. Strangely, this comes as no surprise to me.

Nothing seems to have come of this previous enterprise though – I can’t find a single other thing about it. One has to assume that they weren’t quite in the league of all the other con-artists out there. It does add one further arrow to my quiver though – the ShooTaggers are even more obviously in it for the money. They’ve found the rich seam that is gullible New Age woowoo and they’re mining it for all they’re worth.

On a slightly more disturbing note, I draw your attention to a comment on this post on a blog called The Dish. Melissa Rogers, CEO of ShooTag claims to be sending the tags to Africa, a country that has a crippling malaria problem:

We have sent our People -Mosquito tags to Africa and Haiti. We have Africa interested in purchasing our tags.

I’m pretty sure that this is nothing more than grandiose bragging on Ms Rogers’ part ((it’s proving to be a habit of hers)) (‘sending the tags to Africa’ and ‘having Africa interested in purchasing our tags’ means fuck all in any real sense), but if the ShooTag crowd are venturing into a territory that sees them offering protection against malaria, Dengue fever, Ross river virus, Yellow fever, West Nile virus and the host of other mosquito-borne diseases that kill over a million people every year, then they better have something more convincing than the claptrap they’ve trotted out so far. While they’re currently hoodwinking gullible pet owners they’re relatively inconsequential – if they cross the line into allowing people to die through their misleading claims, they will have more than my annoyance to deal with.

Tetherd Cow Ahead celebrates World Homeopathy Awareness Week!

You don’t have to be a complete idiot to get the best out of it, but it really helps.