THE RETURN OF THE PHISHER FOLK

I’m still being bombarded by “PayPal” who are insistent that there’s a problem with my “account” and that I should log in using the link they’ve sent. No thanks.

How did scammers work in the old days? Did they knock the door and ask for your bank details? Maybe they phoned people up with surveys about the ‘most popular mothers’-maiden-names’ or requested the immediate return of a carrier pigeon with your pin code conveniently wrapped around its leg. No. I expect they just hid in the woods with a mask and a gun, waiting for your coach to rumble on by. It’s the same thing. The personal touch; in-person scamming. Happier times.

These people, the Phisher Folk, are just insidious. They chip away at an inbox, eroding confidence in anything that’s genuine, building algorithms and running them through banks of underground servers. A computer creates a million strings of fake email addresses, giving them identities like “PayPal Services” or “PayPal Support” and then another computer sends the scam to a million other people, hoping that a small proportion of them will panic and click the link. And sadly, they’re right: it’s worth £4 million a year to them.

And it’s every day now! There’s a problem with my ‘account’ that needs ‘emergency attention’ while it’s ‘suspended’ due to ‘suspicious activity’.

Baloney. And the worst of it is that it contributes more and more to this societal disbelief of anything authoritative. We’re being forced into not believing anybody out there - even the genuine people. Everyone, we’re led to believe, has an agenda: get rich, stay famous, keep power, whatever. It’s deeply cynical, like crying wolf in a village where the wolves run the newspapers.

Anyway. That’s all very negative. Phishing’s part of the modern world I guess, whether we like it or not, so it’s best to be smarter, more aware of the devilish tricks that get cleverer with technology. And then of course there’s the beauty of genuineness and sincerity - a thing we’re hard-wired to recognise in each other’s faces, not emails. I like to think I can trust my instinct face-to-face. As the tech makes us more remote, perhaps we should claim back a little more of that awkward human interaction stuff. Life feels simpler somehow if you can make someone smile, after all.

Not that that helps with the likes of Phishers Anonymous Pretending To Be PayPal of course. I just wish they’d stop it.