OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | Of The Nigerian Lottery & Other Scams On Web To Clean You Out | Farrukh Dhondy

“The season’s greetings were of warm desire

And yet around our world the wailing choir

Rings out in every wind, vibrations thick

--Of the call of the bombed, displaced and sick

Misery imposed by some human being

Devoid of decency, blind to seeing.

Will season’s prayers redeem us and bring peace?

--Yes certainly! -- When life on earth will cease.”

From The Wallow of the Punkawalla

I have won the Nigerian Lottery several times. It has demanded my bank account details and passwords so that they can deposit the millions I have won. I have never bought a ticket but was told that an anonymous friend had bought fifty in my name and one of them won.

I replied only once when my bank account was in severe arrears, so the poor scam-merchants would have accessed an account in the red. (That was long ago… Even so, compassionate contributions are eternally welcome).

The inventions of technology in this lifetime have contributed in unbelievable measure to the possibility, amongst other forms of crime and exploitation, of human beings cheating each other.

Last month the BBC aired a programme called Sexploiters that was presented by my daughter Tir Dhondy. It involved male victims in the United States and Europe who were targeted on the Internet by Nigerian gangs. They would be sent fake introductions to and pictures of young women looking for a relationship. As their interaction progressed, they would exchange nude, even compromising photographs and intimate messages. Then the Nigerian scammers would move in, blackmailing the victims, threatening to expose their correspondence to parents, friends and work associates. To stop that they would demand blackmail money.

Tir’s investigation began with an interview with the parents of a blackmailed young man who had taken his own life. She then very bravely went to speak to the blackmailing “sexploiters” in the slums of Nigeria.

I have, through the years, had several emails telling me that my computer is in grave danger of revealing my bank details or some other hazard, and I should click a link to enable some remote controller who cleans up computers to have complete access to my computer which they would use to clean it out.

Of course, they intended to clean me out by accessing my bank details and my contacts list, whom they could then send false exploitative messages to, saying I was in trouble and needed an urgent loan. They might even find some way to blackmail me as in Tir’s doc. I did cut out of the scam, but assured the friend who alerted me to it, and now my gentle readers, that I was not vulnerable to any blackmail although, as Jesus said to the men who were throwing stones at an adulteress: “Let him who is without sin… etc.” Should I admit being like one one of those stone throwers?

The latest scam I have encountered has been in dispute the last few months. Some time ago, I was given, by another daughter and her partner, an oil painting set consisting of a table easel, the oil paint tube collection and three stretched canvases.

I am as good at painting as a caterpillar would be at reproducing the works of Rembrandt. But my babas were perhaps influenced in their choice of gift by the fact that during the Covid pandemic I had been given a watercolour set and had produced in those idle hours several paintings that would not have rivalled Van Gogh, or even the efforts of three-year-olds in the local nursery. The present was well meaning, or perhaps a nudge to get me to make a fool of myself?

Here I was with a wooden table easel for oil painting on canvas and I decided to set it up. It was puzzling and I resorted to the Internet to ask how it was done.

I was directed to a website called MANUALFINDER.COM. I accessed it, followed the instructions by telling it the make etc of the easel. The website said it would charge me £0.95 for the info and asked for debit card details, which I filled in. Ninety-five pence? A coffee costs three times that!

ManualFinders came back to me saying that they couldn’t find the make of that particular easel. Fair enough. I thought I’d ask my painter cousin when he returned to London.

A few days later I checked my bank account on my phone. ManualFinders had used my debit card details to charge me £149 without telling me what that was for.

Gentle reader, all you need to know as a warning is that they had, when I paid the £0.95, perhaps presented me with some obscure text which I skimmed. It must have said I had to tick a box if I didn’t want to become a member at the £149 price, and that would be charged to my card every two months. I hadn’t noticed any box to tick.

I reported it to my bank as a scam. I wrote to ManualFinder saying that I was a journalist and wanted my money back. It took a month of such emails but they agreed to give back my money and cancel the “subscription”.

Beware the Greeks bearing gifts, yes… but today beware ticking or not ticking boxes which make you subscribers to services as useful to you as a bicycle is to an amoeba.