As a native Londoner, I’ll confess that in a delusional fashion, I’ve been guilty of almost arrogantly classing myself as above falling prey to criminals, always classing myself as too savvy to be the victim of petty crime.
In time barely stretching beyond a fortnight, I have had to involve myself in no less than 2 dealings with Action Fraud. Oh it’s long and oh it’s boring.
The first was as the result of nothing more than a good old-fashioned pick-pocketing – Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (let’s not pretend that it was anything more high-brow when I discovered the musical at the age of around 8) and I’ll always have some sympathy for the Fagin’s of this world. – and the second was a result of somebody purchasing a Sky Mobile account in my name.
Even though I’ve never had anything to do with Sky, there is something about the nature of being told formally and more threateningly from the Government’s CCS debt collectors (images of heavies as bailiffs were instantly conjured!) were soon conjured in my at times, all too vivid imagination.
You know where you are with the former. Thieving’s existed forever and you know where you are with literal stealing. I can’t even muster any real hatred for the perpetrators. Along with so many things in this life, it all just involved increased hassle.
I’m sure that you get the picture. Whether or not you’ve been in the specific situation before or not, of having to spend an immensely undue seeming quantity of time on the end of a phone on hold, listening to awful music and being redirected so that you can almost forget the purpose of your wanted conversation, cannot be much of an alien situation? Please appease my conscience here in relating.
Despite having to go around in circles to get your bank cards working again etc., pick-pocketing does what it says on the tin and I knew where I was with that. Arguably even more spineless than mugging, but at least nobody is really harmed.
The concept of somebody imposing your identity, is something that I find far more concerning. This sadly has to be an inevitable consequence of way that the modern world functions. When we are forced to become so reliant on such a wealth of mystery information being transmitted in a way that nobody can surely pretend to have any real knowledge of how it all works.
With so much of our personal information being volunteered into the ether inside a web where we cannot really understand the workings, scammer’s paradise is never be too far from our doorstep.
It’s nothing to get too upset or stressed over, it is just the incredibly inefficient waste of time and energy that is consumed. Banks are certainly no institution that I am ever going to feel much sympathy for, but I’m sure that it globally costs the economy billions of pounds per year.
The vulnerability in having something snatched from us in such a detached way and the fact that it can take such an overload of boredom time to get to the bottom of, is a major gripe about being scammed.
You may rightly question what the purpose of this piece is! I can offer no solutions and I’m not going to provide any annoying tips things to ‘watch out for’ or solutions to this problem. All that I could hope to achieve here, is just that assurance that I am always in search when such a monotonous and seemingly uncalled for situation arises and struggle to find; it happens to us all!