Beware of online thieves trying to harvest your data

IN EARLY September I met a tillage farming friend and asked him how the harvest was progressing. He farms a substantial acreage and said he reckoned he had one of his best crops ever. He had finished combining three weeks earlier than the previous year and average yields topped four tonnes per acre.

He then added that, given the current price for wheat and barley, he thought he would be lucky to break even. It seems he is yet another Irish farmer who is surviving solely due to the basic payment scheme, producing food at below cost and totally dependent on EU subsidies. The basic payment is, of course, a subsidy for the consumer and let no one think differently.

Worst of all, farmers have little or no control over the final prices we receive and at current profit levels it would take very little to send many farmers even deeper into debt. Historically low interest rates are helping farmers and homeowners with mortgages greatly but how long will this last?

The current price of land has little to do with profitability but simply reflects the abundance of cash looking for a safe home. With deposit interest rates at around zero, people with funds are purchasing land for the security it offers and not for any immediate financial return they might hope to get.

To add insult to injury, my friend then told me that his credit card had been illegally accessed a few months earlier and a large sum stolen from his account. His bank, of course, covered the loss but it’s a very scary thing to have your financial details accessed by criminals and there is always the worry that some scam might pass unnoticed until it’s too late.

A few days later, I received a phone call from a gentleman with a foreign accent telling me he was calling from my bank to inform me that I would receive a new credit card “within three working days”.

I was immediately suspicious but listened as he explained that the bank was issuing all customers new cards with heightened security codes.

He then waffled on for a few minutes in an effort to make himself sound credible until the inevitable point came where he asked me for the expiry date on my card. I told him I never give information of that nature over the phone and he then began to try to bully me, stating angrily that he was not seeking information.

At that point I just hung up. On notifying my bank of the call staff said it was the fifth time that day that one of their customers had contacted them having received a similar scam call.

There must have been many more unreported and they repeated their standard advice. Never give any information of that nature to anyone over the phone or via an email. That is, of course, just common sense but clearly many people get conned and we must be continually on our guard.

I receive such phone calls approximately once a fortnight along with literally hundreds of emails from deposed African princes or South American generals on the run who have millions to put on deposit and just happen to want to stash it in to my account.

If I help them out, they will pay me a percentage amounting to perhaps a million or so and guess what, all I have to do is give them my banking details. It’s that simple.

Some of these emails are hilarious to read and, naturally, I instantly bin them along with the messages from lovely Russian ladies who