We seem, as society to be going backwards sometimes.
I was listening to morning radio and to a report on on-line scamming and how so many people are losing thousands of dollars to purportedly legitimate enterprises.
In the old days of the Wild West travelling medicine men or 'snake-oil salesmen' were the symbols of scamming and who were out to rip you off:
There have always been all sorts of religious charlatans - well, by the very nature of religion this is not surprising - who have existed through the ages from guys pretending that burning foliage talked to them, to nutters drawing things on stone tablets and saying that a god gave them to him and in the modern age television evangelists asking for donations for their next Lear jet.
The 'wide guy' with the deal for you who accosts tourists has become a bit of a cliche and only the very dumb will be taken in by him:
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The sensible person of course doesn't open these 'offers' and certainly doesn't remit thousands of dollars without getting proper verification but - the scammers are getting more sophisticated. The radio report I listened to told of intelligent, professional people being taken in. I receive scamming or phishing emails daily - this morning two legitimate looking ones exhorting me to invest in bitcoins. They are bloody annoying. When I get one purporting to be from Apple, my bank, Inland Revenue etc I forward them to the various companies Phishing sites but often just delete them.
The problem is though that the internet is becoming a minefield. This is 2017. Things should be better. The fact that there is bugger-all policing and control of this is like being back in the 'Wild West' or way back to unenlightened times when some charlatan starts lobbing stone tablets down to naive acolytes.
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