One Million Dollars
This week things were enlivened when I received a mysterious email purporting to be someone important from my work. In it they said that they needed me to send my WhatsApp details so they could task me with something confidential and important.
All of this, of course, was ‘AROOGA! AROOGA!’ levels of suspicious.
I work part time, for minimum wage for a huge, bookshop chain. This would never be how they would communicate with anyone, for a start. But also, there is literally nothing anyone could want me to do that would require secret squirrel levels of activity. I am not the lowest peg on the rung. I am several layers below that, somewhere in the muck and mire looking woefully at a rung that will never be mine.
What does constitute highly confidential activity in the book trade anyway?
Ring Dan Brown anonymously and tell him his books are crap?
Sign copies of the Bible for the LOLs?
Tippex out crucial lines in Mary Berry’s new Baking Bible to give more market share to Paul Hollywood?
Shun Jeffrey Archer if he comes in wanting to sign anything?
I did a bit of checking. The actual email address did not match the person who they claimed to be which was only one of so many red flags it was beginning to resemble coronation bunting. Nevertheless, because I was a bit bored and a lot nosy I gave this person my WhatsApp details, deciding that a block button would be my friend in these circumstances.
Also, I never get the chance to do anything remotely risky or hedonistic these days. My hips are too fucked for me to dance on tables. I like to be in my pyjamas by 8.30 p.m. and you can forget drunken shenanigans. If I even drink coffee after midday I feel like I’m living on the very brink of chaos. The raging anxiety, palpitations and sleepless sweats that come with that will testify to how much of a risk taker I am prepared to be nowadays.
I received a number of increasingly urgent WhatsApp messages at this point. Every time they messaged, they put my name in the sentence.
‘Are you there, Katy?’
‘I need you to drop everything you are doing and complete this task for me urgently, Katy?’
It was like talking to someone who has been to a workshop to conquer anxiety in social situations and is finding ways to repeat your name in case they suddenly burst into tears in the middle of an ambassador’s reception, knock over the pyramid of Ferrero Rocher and shout: ‘It’s no good! God knows I am trying here but I just can’t remember if you’re Alan or Susan and it’s all I can think about,’ before fleeing the room in disgrace.
The person instructed me to go to ‘a store’ and buy them ‘some vouchers, Katy.’
Confidential, urgent vouchers of an unspecified nature. Because apparently they were in an important conference with no access to phones and I was the only person who could supply them.
Up to now, all my answers to their questions had been ‘no’ or ‘yes’. At this stage I went for a whole sentence: ‘What type of vouchers?’
‘iTunes vouchers, Katy.’
iTunes vouchers? iTunes vouchers? All that build up and he wants iTunes vouchers? What a gigantic let down that turned out to be.
Up to this point I had been quite enjoying my scammer. From the outset, apart from all the other massive tells, it was clear that this person had never in their life written a work email, or indeed been to a conference of any kind, but God loves a tryer and they were really trying. Up until the iTunes moment I’d say they were 100% great value. After that it was like dealing with Dr. Evil.
Buy me four sherbet dib dabs and put them in an Uber.
I want £2.50 in Postal Orders.
Put a shiny penny under a flower pot in your front garden.
Clap your hands together and shout ‘I believe in fairies.’
Disappointing. Disappointing. Disappointing. The criminal fraternity have really let themselves go. Where is their pride?
Jason tells me that their real goal was my telephone number as it proves I am a ‘live suspect’ and ‘highly gullible’. He says they have now sold my number to Russians who make lists of people like me.
Good luck to them, I say. If they are hoping to rinse my bank account they are not taking into account that I have two, teenage children with no jobs who can put skilled Russian mobsters to shame. They are welcome to that £3.47. I hope you can get iTunes vouchers for such low denominations.
As for my scammer, we ended our lovely chat abruptly after he sent me this message.
‘What do you mean ‘No’, Katy?’