Friday, August 16, 2019


Two more (long) rows of Spring Shawl today. I am now thoroughly embarked on the final motifs, the cats’ eyes. That's better.

I got a nice little book of “Ten Poems About Knitting” for my birthday earlier this week. (86! How did that happen?) One of them begins “I knit to keep death away” – and the line is underlined. Surely not by the sender! It’s a bit unnerving.

Lizzie and Dan are safely here, looking remarkably spruce after a night of sitting bolt upright on a bus. Various people will gather here tomorrow for a bread-and-cheese lunch before we go to see “Austentatious”. If I’m strong enough. I am in some doubt.

Scams

I’m calming down a bit. Archie, on being told the story, says that the scammers must have thought they were about to land a big fish. Indeed so.

Clearly, there are great similarities on both sides of the pond. I get a lot of those calls to say that I am about to lose my internet connection – almost all from non-native-English-speakers. In January when we are all tearing our hair out at the approach of the Income Tax deadline, we have wonderful ones, recorded in perfect HMRC voices, to say that our tax affairs are being investigated. Very scary, but it needs only a moment to reflect that, on a land line, at least, a recorded message must be harmless because there is no way Her Majesty can know whether or not the butler has answered the phone.

(Alexander has told me always to disregard recorded messages.)

An old boy who used to be a governor of the Bank of England got caught by the loss-of-internet one recently. (They install something very nasty on your computer if you let them.) And a shrewd columnist on the Times nearly fell for one of the worst, when you get an email purportedly from your accountant or your lawyer or your estate agent changing their bank details and then you send your tax payment or the down payment on your new house to the wrong address.

Jeanfromcornwall, I was delighted to hear from a fellow Thunderer fan. I can’t remember how my husband and I heard about them, but when we did we went to the factory (which is in Birmingham, where we lived) and bought two. They hang by the back door in Kirkmichael and are used when someone needs urgently to summon help. I blew a Thunderer when I broke my right arm.

7 comments:

  1. My husband and I have both had an e-mail version of the scam in which the sender claims to know that the recipient has been watching porn and what's more claims to have hacked into the computer and used the camera to film the recipient! It goes on to threaten to send the images to your complete address list unless you send them a huge sum in Bitcoin. Now I call this blackmail, pure and simple. But it could be very scary for someone, and lead to various possible tragic outcomes.

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    1. The company I work for had its email hacked, and I used to get messages like this as if from my Boss! I let them know... took them several months to fix it!

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  2. I hadn’t heard of that one. It is most unpleasant. And, as you say, potentially dangerous.

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  3. And please, don’t stop writing. This blog is so much more than knitting. I feel like it’s a daily chat with a friend who also enjoys reading and knitting.

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  4. It's all garbage! I came home to find the dear husband in the midst of such a scam from someone claiming to be from Microsoft. I immediately hung up the phone and my son and I installed an anti-virus program to ensure they hadn't done too much trouble. The idiots had the nerve in the days following to call me and try to continue their scam! A computer expert from Britain named Jim Browning has a wonderful YouTube channel that exposes these bad people and educates others on their bad acts. He provides a public service, IMHO!

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