It must be that time of year again. Last week, I started receiving a series of emails from HM Revenue and Customs, no less, informing me of Underreported Income.
This email – I received ELEVEN of them in the first day alone, addressed to differently named people in the company – informs me of the most urgent need to review my tax statement online by logging into the HMRC website. Even the most superficial examination of the link supplied suggests that it would lead the curious clicker to a web site somewhere in Eastern Europe, or the Far East perhaps.
What is wrong with these people? Is there a whole generation of Chinese Schoolboys who think, “I know what I’ll do today, I’ll bombard the entire population of the UK with scam emails, lovingly composed in Pigeon English, just because I can”? After all, they must reason, by now the English who are clearly the most gullible nation on earth, must have had their fill of Urgent Security Notices from banks with whom they have no account; warning them of the dire consequences of not verifying the intimate details of accounts they do not hold by logging into a poorly disguised Czech or Nigerian website?
Where do they think we’ve been for the last five years? On a remote island, bereft of modern digital communications and therefore oblivious to the construction fund surpluses, oil well revenue sharing schemes and bank security scams that have become so much a feature of everyday life here on Planet Reality?
There is however one feature of these annoying intrusions that gives me considerable encouragement. It is this: One can only admire the standards of the teaching of literary English in the third world. Not since Dickens’ time has one’s bank manager or HM inspector of Taxes actually addressed anybody as “Most Esteemed Sir” and it is certainly flattering and strangely comforting to receive the occasional email (well ,rather too many of them actually) that begin with this salutation.
So, I am wondering if there is any reader out there who has actually been taken in by one of these most cunning deceptions? If you are that person, I’d like to hear from you and please enclose a cheque for a modest £2,000 – it’s a “facilitation fee” see – made out to Prince Nazim Smith, Finance Minister of The Royal Republic of Burundi.
For the time being, I send my readers the most warm and felicitatious consideration of their extreme happiness.