For everyone who invents an amazing technology, there are thousands ready to rip people off with it – and millions who’ll fall for it. Luckily not all the scam artists are what you’d call “smart”, or even “recognisably sentient”, so some scammers get caught more embarrassingly that a clown shoplifting lingerie.
1. The Cellphone Sorceress
The “Sorceress of Nizza Monferraro” sounds like an Italian World of Warcraft villain, and claimed she could not only contact the dead – she could give them SMS coverage. If you can see where this is going, congratulations, you’re smarter than a young woman who paid twenty-five thousand euros for seven text messages. Which came from the “clairvoyant”’s phone.
It’s still hard to get angry at the crook: sure, she’s an awful emotional leech who sucks money from the grief of others, but she did find someone who’d pay eight euros a character and didn’t get suspicious until the bill hit five figures. That’s like winning the lottery of stupid, and you don’t even need a ticket.
2. True Caller ID
In what was either secret awesomeness by phone providers or the worst scammers ever, Tennessee residents received calls where a voice identified himself as a bank representative. Caller ID, however, identified him as “THIS IS A SCAM”, so subsequent attempts to get account numbers and passwords were a bit of an uphill battle.
The possibilities are either
a) Some scummy phisher thought “it’d be hilarious if I wrote ‘this was a scam’ in this little box nobody ever sees. Who knows what a ‘Callerid’ is anyway?”
b) Somebody at some phone company, somewhere, finally started doing something about the incredibly obvious scammers instead of quoting “client confidentiality (they pay us more money than you)”.
c) The telecomms grid has become sentient, and has decided to protect us from fraud.
Whichever is true, it’s pretty cool!
3. Hello, this is a criminal
Master criminal Christopher Kron not only failed to live up to his name’s potential as a clock-themed Batman villain, he failed at regular crime too. He broke into the Junkanoo restaurant in Florida, slowly searched through the bar as alarms blared through the building at approximately a trillion decibels, and when the security company called to ask who was there he – in the stupidest misuse of phones since the screaming baby ringtone – gave his own name. Oh, and he was caught on security tape. And caught in real life when he returned to the bar the next day.
On top of that, in final proof that it’s always possible to fail harder than mere mortals think possible, he only stole a bottle of Grand Marnier.
The best bit is the WINK news headline: ‘Burglar busted after what some call a “stupid” mistake.’
Some? Listen, WINK, if you meet anybody who doesn’t call that stupid, it’s only because they haven’t got to ‘S’ in their chewable “Learning the English Language for people with four brain cells” book.
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