Not-so-nice of you to call

To some it sounded more like a jokey app. Your target’s phone rings and they hear an angry voice nutting off abusively, but also entertainingly. Well, it’s entertaining to the snickering prankster who sent the prerecorded message. Perhaps even if you’re a robust sort of recipient.

But police have identified something darker – scam, not prank – behind a series of particularly aggressive calls from a stranger, with a strong foreign accent, demanding compensation for a vehicle collision.

You’d have to be stupid to fall for that, some online eye-rollers have felt the need to declare.

Other commentators puff out their chests and detail how much pleasure they’d gain from responding in various pugnacious ways.

Well aren’t they impressive? Police are quite right, however, that it’s potentially upsetting, even for those who mightn’t for one moment be at risk of paying out to some faraway villain.

Some people are meek, polite, liable to be left shaking in distress by being the target of forceful anger, however faked it may be.

Regrettably the sour strategy of the scammer is often to target seniors because the odds of success are better.

However it would be rather too sweeping to envisage the elderly, collectively, as the vulnerable ones. For one thing, if you can’t picture a bunch of older people from your acquaintance who would be entirely capable of being exactly as forthright on their own behalf as the occasion requires then you mustn’t know very many.

Doesn’t each of us also know gentler types, of all ages, who might benefit from a specific heads-up that such unpleasantness is afoot? Raising it with them would surely be the decent thing to do, just to keep them in the loop.

A consumer protection advertisement – a welcome one – has hit the screens of the nation highlighting how to react to a particularly common online scam. The target’s screen reads: ‘‘Security breach...your bank accounts have been frozen . . . must act now . . . click on this link. . . ‘‘

Happily the man has the support no senior citizen should be without. A telepathic dog. (Yes, well . . .)

His paw shoots out and stays his master’s hand, and with an earnest look he sends the mental message: ‘‘Weird email out of the blue, scare tactics, pressure to act quickly? . . . Real banks never email links to online banking and ask for your password . . ‘‘

Good dog. A statement of the blimmin’ obvious, perhaps, but worthwhile it helps the message reach, or even remind, those who would benefit from it.

So, all together now: Scammers can come at you over the phone as well as online. In any case, never click on the links or attachments in emails and text messages that ask you to login or verify your password. No legit authority is going to contact you out of the blue wanting remote access to your computer. Or your credit card number. Or date of birth. Be aware that scammers can mock up near perfect copies of emails from banks and authorities.

And do hook into the likes of Scamwatch and NetSafe if you’re online. Apart from anything else, once you start it’s kind of fun.