Another bee in the bonnet . . .

They are preparing to spend a fortune on supplying broadband to the whole country.  No doubt some people want it, and some will benefit from it.  Yet it is arguable that a great number will suffer as a result of it.  Because the internet is Scam City and what broadband will do is make the process of being fleeced even quicker.

Now, there are scams all over the place.  The practically non-stop calls from Paddy McGillicuddy ringing from Google and the Indian subcontinent have finally tapered off—although I got an isolated one some two months ago.  But that was just the shaking of the bag.  By this stage they have exhausted that particular feeding ground and moved on.

But the internet is even more insidious, with no end to the variation of scams that can nest in it and go viral.  And despite what is claimed, they cannot be stopped.  The various ‘patches’ and remedies applied are nothing more than sticking plaster on sticking plaster—for the truth is that whatever man can devise, man can equally pull asunder.  Indeed, the new anti-scam system that is due to be introduced over the next year or so for on-line commerce is likely to have as primary effect the slowing down and the complification of the whole process of doing business over the internet.

At the same time people are recklessly putting all their most important data—their banking details etc.—on to various platforms, where they are accessible to clever scammers.  Of course, for the time being, banks etc. are prepared to countenance compensation—but one can only imagine the hoops of time and effort that need be jumped through in order to get your money back.

And I say ‘for the time being’ because there is absolutely no doubt that as soon as they can kill-off completely over-the-counter banking, or when we are all entangled in the mesh of the famous ‘cashless society’, then the whole process of compensation will quickly come to an end.

As it is, we are already well along the road.  By cutting branches and cutting the number of manned counter windows per branch down to the bare minimum, the banks are engaged in a process of not-so-gently nudging everyone into line about being on-line. And it is not just the banks, I saw an advertisement recently—I can’t remember where or for exactly what--which included the tag line ‘On-line applications only’.  And if one has reason—and increasingly one has reason—to query an account or the delivery of a service, the first thing you are asked for is documentary evidence to be forwarded—via I-phone.

I consider on-line and telephone scams, together with the increasingly enforced drive to compel people on-line—whether they are capable of being, or want to be, or not—to be among the greatest social evils of the past twenty or so years.  All that time I have sat waiting to see these matters raised in the Dail—perhaps they have; but if so they failed to make any significant public splash.

It is probably impossible to quantify the true amount of money that has been conned down the years by on-line and telephone scammers—initially from the vulnerable, but increasingly from the general population as well.  And the fact is that it is not decreasing, but all the time becoming more sophisticated and certainly exponential.

The real bugbear I have is with the telephone scams.  For years now telephone companies have had the ability to itemise calls outgoing and calls received, duration of calls etc. etc., so that it has always seemed strange to me that they couldn’t monitor suspicious flows of on-line traffic and quickly stop it.  I can’t believe that this was beyond their technical capacity.  Yet the fact seems to be that they could not be bothered.

Nor did anybody seemingly hold their feet to the fire on the matter.  One would imagine that any politician worth his salt would long ago have sniffed out the electoral advantages to be gained from taking the matter public.  But none seems to have done so.  Perhaps the fact that individuals scammed tend as a rule to keep a low profile through embarrassment has something to do with it.

The length of time the Google from India scam went on is a measure of how successful it was—and how many repeat customers among the vulnerable it managed to find.

Yet nobody did anything.