This is not car-crash TV
WHATEVER happened to the car crash folk? I rather miss them. You know the guys I mean, I assume? Every couple of weeks, one of these total strangers would ring up, out of the blue, and tell me they could help get compensation for the accident I’d been involved in.
It was so kind of them, offering to go to so much trouble on my behalf, that I didn’t have the heart just to tell them I hadn’t been in one.
Instead, I went along with it for a while, so as not to seem ungrateful.
“You mean the shunt I had outside Sainsbury’s in my Fiat Panda at 1.14pm on January 7?” I’d inquire, presenting them with this or a similar scenario I’d just invented on the spot.
“Er... yeah,” they’d reply, sounding surprised at how vividly I had ecalled the details. “That’s the one...”
The snag with all this, of course, is that stringing along a scammer, wasting their presumably precious time, tends to lose its novelty quite quickly. So, having had my fun, I used to bring the conversation to a close quite abruptly, by informing the caller that no such accident had occurred, that I’d never owned a Panda – neither the vehicular kind nor the cuter, furrier variety – and that, once this call of ours had concluded, I’d very much like them to go and stick a cactus up their bottom.
Like I say, it’s been ages since I’ve heard from these chaps, and I am sure it’s not because I was arguably a tad blunt with them. My hunch is, they’ve moved on to even more fiendish scams, taking advantage of the truly terrible things that technology now allows truly terrible people to do.
The latest of Alexis Conran’s scare-your-pants-off shows, IDENTITYTHEFT: DON’T GET CAUGHT OUT (8pm, Channel 5), features some particularly horrific case studies, the worst of which involve artificial intelligence software.
AI technology now allows criminals to clone people’s voices with uncanny accuracy, opening up all kinds of chilling possibilities. The only thing the crims require is a short recording of a person’s voice, enough for the software to learn how they speak. From this they can create a recording of that person saying whatever they want them to say.
Alexis is even given a demo using his own voice. It leaves him somewhat horrified.
“Hey, it’s me,” the fake Alexis (Alexis Conman?) is saying. “I left my wallet at home. Can you transfer me 100 quid?”
The way things are going, will we reach a point where we end up trusting nobody, fearing everyone is out to abuse our good nature? It’s looking that way.
Still, I’ll wait until after the election before suggesting that’s such a bad thing.