It may be an email offering a tax refund – just hit this link – but it’s from “The ATO”, which is then defined as “The Australian Tax Organisation”. Or it’s a text from my Newcastle health insurer which for some reason now has an American zipcode in its address. Or there are three spelling mistakes and an egregious grammatical error in what is supposedly an email from my bank.

Loading

Come on chaps, try a little harder. The Australian banks may be evil empires eager to rip off their customers, charging them fees even unto the grave, but they rarely suffer grammatical errors when doing so.

The trick is to always ask, “Does this feel normal?” This simple method recently saved a friend of mine, who nearly fell for a travel scam. First, the scammers convinced her she’d lost her money by booking with a fake hotel, then they gave her a call centre number so she could, “get her money back”.

Actually, the fake hotel hadn’t been fake at all; it was the call centre that was fake. How did she know?

It was the one call centre in the world that answered her call straight away. No “dial five if it’s travel related”, no “your call is important to us”, no bloody Vivaldi for what seem to be all seven of The Four Seasons.

No, she got straight through. Polite man with a refined English accent. Perfect service with the chap keen to immediately take her details, beginning with her bank account “just to check against our records”.

At which point she hung up. With this excellent level of service, it just had to be a rip-off.

That’s why I want to set up a School for Scammers. Applicants will be asked to supply all their bank details and personal data. If they comply, they will be deemed too credulous, and their application will be cancelled.

Those who make it through the initial cull, those happy few, will be tutored in the basics of grammar and punctuation. They will be taught that Australian addresses end in a four-digit postcode. They will be told it’s the tax “office” not “organisation”. And they’ll be taught that you can’t just throw in semicolons at random in any sentence, like squiggly confetti, as the scammers always do.

Oh, and if they want to set up a fake call centre, they will be required to make it feel real, with an interminable wait, a slightly bad-tempered operator and the need to ring again three times because the line fell out just as you were finally answered.

Loading

Only when the victims have endured all of these horrors will they believe it’s a genuine Australian corporation.

I’ll also teach them a lesson called “Kindly, remember not to use the word kindly”. For some reason, scammers use a sort of courtly English that is never used by real corporations. “Kindly transfer the money immediately,” say the scammers, in a tone rarely used by Westpac, Energy Australia or the ATO.

Of course, I’d charge heavily for entry to the course, and I’d end up as wealthy as a Nigerian prince.

Speaking of which, I now need somewhere to deposit my funds, as I can’t use my own phone to achieve the transfer. Sadly, it is fully damaged. I don’t suppose you could kindly send me details of your bank account?