A Bit about... People trying to make money out of you...

It seems to me that wherever you look there are scams or people wanting to make money out of you in some form or other. You can’t turn on your email without receiving on thousand mails about Payment Protection Insurance. You could be owed thousands of pounds! What if you have never even taken out PPI? These people don’t care, they will just keep on flooding your mail box with more and more emails. I have mentioned scams before on this blog, I know… But it just seems to be getting worse.

Let’s look at people who want to make money out of you any way they can. People phoning up and asking to speak to Mr Smith… sorry, Mr Smith doesn’t live here… okay, can I speak to the home owner? I usually hang up by then. Now I don’t even bother to say anything, I just hang up as soon as I hear that ominous pause before someone from India or another such far away call centre starts to speak.

Then there are the ones who do it sneakily, like getting you to send texts so that you can have your fortune read or something… my daughter fell prey to this recently. Basically you sent a text to this genie thing and asked it to answer a question about you, which it did, and charged you 1.25 for the privilege. She ended up spending over 8 quid unknowingly (but there are people who wasted more money), thinking that because she had unlimited texts on her phone package she could do this for free. She was wrong. Suffice to say she won’t do it again.

Won a prize is some strange draw? No you haven’t… nobody gives anything away for free. Claim your 1m win… yes, right. Pull the other one, matey…

It’s all about money, isn’t it! The internet… what a great tool, what a great source of information, but you have to plough through the dredge before you get to what you want. Let’s say you think your child has chicken pox and go on the internet to look for symptoms… First up we have mittens for sale, to stop your child from scratching themselves! I don’t want mitts, I want to see the symptoms! Stop trying to get money out of me!