Why we love the internet fraudsters

I used to get tears in my eyes and flinch whenever the black-ringed pages in the Sugar Plum Fairy School Holiday Calendar of Doom swam across my peripheral vision. I don’t now.

Thanks to those lovely people from the on-line criminal community, entertaining my three children has never been easier. Instead of creative play - in our house a euphemism for ever more imaginative forms of sibling on sibling violence - the children cluster eagerly round the computer (I prefer the piano on cultural grounds but it’s impossible to attach the mouse to the keyboard) so we can download the latest batch of fraudulent e-mails and nominate the thief du jour.

I was keen that my children – like everyone else’s, so sheltered that they believe the outside world comes packaged in 10-minute segments spliced together with commercials – should become a bit more street wise, without, of course, actually having to go into a real street.

Then, quite by accident, I found a way of introducing my children to Real Life – or, at least, a virtual version of it, when I put a violin up for sale with a specialist on-line site. I paid a modest fee, sat back and waited. Within days, I had dozens of new friends, all trying to steal my money and, quite unintentionally, providing hours of educational fun, spanning everything from grammar and geography to forensic psychology.

Thanks to classics like ‘Mog, the Forgetful Cat’ and ‘Burglar Bill’, my three knew for a fact that all burglars sport those easy-to-recognise black and white Breton-with-a-twist T-shirts – although the eldest was beginning to question this if only on grounds of style. After all, Prada isn’t exactly rushing to launch Hessian sacks marked ‘Swag’. Not as far I know, anyway.

So the first lesson was about the evolution of burglars. The children shuddered as I explained the tough, tough world of traditional burglary, all outdoors with the ever-present indignity of having to say “It’s a fair cop, gov,” to a panting PC Plod – and the alternative, sitting cosily indoors, using guile and the internet to extract the loot and relying on on-line anonymity to make a quick getaway. It’s a no-brainer.

In fact, as crooks no longer have to be fit enough to outrun the local bobby, I’m convinced that their new working practices are linked directly to the soaring obesity rates.

Then it was time to check the e-mails. Crooks work so hard to lure you into their evil webs of words that the strands of personal information intended to be irresistibly enticing invariably sound as if they’ve been lifted straight from 'The Incredibly Stupid Punter’s Guide to Getting Conned'.

After only a little practice, the children became experts. Tony, for example, was: ‘a tourist I tour the world. Let me hear from you’. All fine, until he signed himself off as Susan. However far he travelled, it was clear that the line of bemused travellers in his wake would always stretch further.

Owen was keen for me to ‘facilitate … with faults affectig (sic) the product’ and
assisted ‘various beneficials\clients regardless of their little financial strength’. We all warmed to kind Owen, who wanted to buy my violin as part of ‘an attempt to put together an entertainment school for a client’ - until we realised that he was sending us the same e-mail day in, day out, under at least ten different names and had so many incarnations he would have been perfectly cast as the new Doctor Who.

Owen’s caring attitude was shared by the equally lovely Williams, who enquired tenderly after my family’s health before offering to buy the violin ‘ for a staff of mine’. And who said employee motivation was dead?

Then we moved on to geography, and how not to do it. Not surprisingly, the world the fraudsters inhabit is as skewed as the English they use. John Thomas (yes, really) was ‘a US expartriate (sic) based in the New Zealand’; James Femson, an engineer ‘in the north part of ireland’ (sic). It was hard to imagine what Henry Fish, a 'local dealer of cars spare parts in Denmark' would do with a late 19th century violin, unless he planned to use it as an emergency in-car entertainment system in adverse weather conditions.

Next came literacy, as the children competed to spot the moment when the authors ran short of time, patience and editing skills. Frequent requests to buy the ‘(violin)’ indicated an advanced cut and paste problem but others went one better by offering to buy the wrong item altogether. With his touching yet completely misguided desire to purchase the ‘advert piano’, Harry was the children’s virtual fraud winner until he was trumped by the bizarrely named Stone, who had clearly lost the plot quite some time before he e-mailed me, appropriately in Comic Sans MS font, to say that he was ‘very much interested in purchasing your horse’. You can lead a horse to the Elgar Violin Concerto, Stone, but it’ll never hit a top ‘F’.

The violin is still awaiting a new home. But who cares? I now have three children so attuned to fraud that they wouldn’t reply to an e-mail from Father Christmas if it contained the words ‘cashier’s cheque’. And thanks to my new network of criminally-minded pen pals, the children and I can survive any holiday – just as long as they keep the e-mails coming.