Vulnerable need protection in era of new technology
We require laws and statutes that reflect our concern for the vulnerable in our society. Indeed things need to move with the rapid changes that society now endures. Technology is a double-edged sword of both aid and curse.
Let me explain. My 91-year-old mother has informed me that she was scammed by an unsolicited telephone call (purporting to be from Spark), which culminated in the request to take thousands of dollars from her bank account and send it to a recipient in India via the Western Union Agency on Taradale Rd. My mother got the cash out, but rang me before making the Western Union transfer. Her money is now safe.
Why in this modern age of internet banking, debit/credit cards, legitimate interbank transfers etc. is a fossil like Western Union allowed to continue to operate? We have legislation covering money laundering etc, which applies to banks, credit unions, real estate agencies, TABs etc but does it cover entities like Western Union?
Do the police liaise with Western Union agencies to warn them when an elderly person is attempting to remit large sums of money to obscure Third World countries, which should raise alarms? I doubt it. Did Hawke’s Bay people know there are 11 Western Union outlets – mainly operating out of dairies or the likes?
Do elderly, or indeed other potential scam targets get a regular warning that if, when the phone rings it takes 10 or so seconds to make the connection – it is probably a scam, so hang up. If someone rings from say Tokyo, the connection is instant – no delay.
It is only when the person making the call is doing it by computer generation (hundreds of calls at the same instant) that the delay is to give them time to get on the line and converse.
This type of message should be printed and broadcasted on a regular basis to all New Zealanders.
Scam artists are vermin. Don’t let me get started on “pay day” lenders and the like, either. Robbie McKee Otane Search for the truth Timely article by Professor Paul Moon on free speech and truth.
Hus,Tyndale, Milton (streets in Napier named after them) and John Stuart Mill are within my sphere of research but Moon had me on Zamyatin.
But then Moon is a professional. The quote from Mill “the collision of adverse opinions” — the only means of discovering the truth. So apt. Yet now, with so many sources of information are the masses lulled asleep by fiction, entertainment and misinformation?
Has the fourth estate become more a fifth column? Was the freedom engendered by the invention of the Gutenburg Press subverted quickly by those interests with a vested interest in controlling you and I?
The collision of adverse opinions is abhorrent to the “bumper sticker” slogan crowd who with connivance from vested interests promote the AGW myth (now “emergency”) and preach, for example, that vaccines are “safe and effective”.
Both camps (often the same people) can only resort to calling “truth seekers” deniers. All instruments of control by fear.
A lesson from The Wizard of Oz.
Pull back the curtain and expose the manipulators or manipulation behind. That was the intention of author L Frank Baum (1856-1919) as wonderfully illustrated by Ellen Hodgson Brown in her book The Web of Debt (2007) and the earlier DVD
The Money Masters by Bill Still. Brown's sequel just released is Banking on the People - Democratising Money in the Digital Age. John Smith Napier