This indispensable gadgie maybe doesn’t fix broken hearts, but he does everything else.
Having painted my garden fence a fashionable fyuchie grey, Jake set to work on reddin’ oot my gutters. That’s when I heard him up the ladder in prolonged conversation on his mobile.
Once doon, into his coffee and sausage roll (I ken how to treat ’em), here’s him: “That was some feel gype wi’ a lang say-away aboot my havin’ a car accident. He widnae tak no for an answer, even though I telt him I was up a ladder. They must think we’re a’ mugs.”
So, I revealed to Jake that I was that mug – several times, including last week’s latest entrapment. First, in the early days with my home computer, a wifie claiming to be from Microsoft fair feartet me, revealing they’d detected a virus and needed into my system to fix it.
Scared and confused, I sat down at the screen and followed her long instructions, little knowing she was drilling deep into my system, basically getting me to hack masellie. Only when she asked for £200 to fix the fault did I suspect something wrong, called my loon, who scraiked to shut down asap. The computer had to be wiped. D’oh.
And again. Put my card in the ATM at Holburn Junction Sainsbury’s. Up comes a message: “There is a fault. Card retained. Report to your bank.” In a blue funk, I galloped up in just 10 minutes to my Queen’s Cross RBS.
Gabbling to the quine what had happened, she checked her screen. Then: “Was this before or after you withdrew £600?” Panic, panic, tears in front of the tellers, whisked off to a room to speak to their fraud squad in London.
The dirty, rotten criminal had put a wire device in the slot, stopping cards from going right in. When the machine issues the fault message, peer victims like me shoot off to contact their banks. Meanwhile, the sodding thief had actually been standing right behind me, noting my PIN number (always cover it!).
When I offskied in distress, he extracted my card using the wires, then stole the max he could from there and nearby machines. To my huge relief, I got the money back.
I’ll draw a veil ower the naistiness of the swine I was being sarky to when he insisted I’d had a car accident. Obviously narked, the rotter phoned me every 15 minutes for about three hours, the messages – until I stopped answering – increasingly filthy.
My latest skirmish in Scamland started a couple of weeks ago, when a Facebook pal messaged: “Look who just passed away. I think you knew him…” and sent a link, which I pressed. No response. Strange, so I messaged back.
Turns oot, he’d been hacked, warned me not to try the link – too late. Better change my password.
A few days later, dozens of my “friends” messaged saying they couldn’t get into the link I’d sent about someone dying. I’d to identify as a hackette, with advice to change their passwords. When will I learn?
Moreen Simpson is a former assistant editor of the Evening Express and The Press & Journal, and started her journalism career in 1970
Conversation