Life used to be simple, but then came the banks
EXCUSE me for being paranoid, but the whole world seems to be under threat by scammers and thieves. Our country has apparently been captured by trickery and treachery, so I feel justifiably jumpy. Our banks warn us frequently not to reply to any e-mail that purports to come from them, and require us to give our account or ID numbers.
This month I have received e-mails from two banks, telling me how lucky I am to have entered the world of paperless banking and how we will save the environment by no longer receiving paper statements. My monthly accounts will now be sent by e-mail, they say.
I am underwhelmed. Both provide my monthly statement as an attachment but both require my ID number and card number in order to open the attachment. They then require me to enter a password. Excuse me for being sceptical.
Be warned, they tell me, and then they do the very thing they have warned me about.
Actually, no thanks. I want my bank statement to come to me via the old-fashioned snail mail and be delivered by a real person on a genuine red bicycle, to land up in my real wooden letter box in the form of a genuine sheet of paper tucked into a real envelope glued shut with real – not virtual – glue.
Please. It all used to be so simple. It worked. Why complicate it?
If our leaders can fall for sneaky tricks by huge institutions like KPMG and Bell Pottinger, what hope have we little people against professional scammers with big computers?
No wonder our country has fallen for the state capture scam. Life is simply too complicated for ordinary people like politicians and us to understand.
Our police are charging about like headless chickens trying to catch cyberthieves who are stealing billions of rand of taxpayers’ money that doesn’t really exist and move it to bank accounts in the names of companies that don’t exist so they can live like millionaires in mansions that do exist and have been paid for by loans from companies that don’t exist.
The cops can’t take fingerprints, because the fingers that stole the money in Joburg and deposited it in Mumbai are probably in Durban. No wonder they don’t have enough time or manpower to deal with real-world crimes like murder, gang shooting, child abuse, assault and rape.
They’re too busy chasing gigabytes.
Last Laugh
Jim’s neighbour kept a few free-range chickens in his garden and they frequently sneaked though a hole in the fence into Jim’s garden and scratched up his seedlings and ate his baby vegetables. He complained to the neighbour but the raids continued.
He was telling a friend about this over a quiet beer in the pub, and ended up saying: “Anyway, I’ve solved the problem now.” “How did you do that?” the friend asked.
“During the night I hid a few eggs under one of my rose bushes and the next day, when my neighbour was watching me I went out with a basket and collected them.
“That afternoon, the fence was repaired.”