Thursday 27 October 2016

Foolish old woman!

The number of scams emails is going up....almost every day I get one asking me to put in my banking details or lose out in some way.
The Facebook scam means that I now realise very quickly that there are two faces with the same picture in the folder...and the latest one is fake.
Last week though I fell for a new one and unrelated to the Internet!
The firm who rang me about my solar tiles say they found my details on an energy register...they were very complimentary about my status as an energy user...and provider!
They told me a surveyor would come to check them for me as they were now out of warranty. I replied that I'd got a maintenance insurance already in place. They told me it was a scam and to cancel it!
Their own surveyor would come and do a free survey!
He came, went up into my loft and came down with bad news!
There was nothing dreadfully wrong with my tiles but my roof was letting in light in places...and therefore rain would get in...leading to all sorts of problems. It needed fixing!
He stayed all morning, set up a detailed work sheet and rang a roofer...who would travel from Hampshire and stay in a bed and breakfast to get the job done!
It would be a three day job and would be very expensive!
Anxious, I agreed! An official looking two page sheet detailed all the work...it was scary!
Fortunately I do have friends....
They listened to this tale of woe and went for a look.....
The short version is that I had been played....a local builder could deal with a couple of small problems in a couple of hours....
I cancelled the job.
I almost fell for it...
Thank goodness for friends.....
I now feel very foolish....to have fallen for what I now see is an obvious scam makes me a daft old woman...
The man was charming....we had a good conversation. And I had already found a couple of damp patches.....
So no matter how wary we are, how aware of the dangers it is still possible to fall for a plausible chap who realised that I'd never go up into my loft on my own...
Frailty they name is woman! Yah!
,



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

2 comments:

Ray Barnes said...

Not foolish, just trusting. Unfortunately that is the very thing the unscrupulous fraudsters rely on.
I think it is a generational issue Jean.
I would never claim that no-one could get in under my guard, but it is one area where my natural cynicism stands me in good stead.
Sad, but necessary.
Thank God for friends.

UKViewer said...

I can recall a salesman, who came around to sell us double glazing - we were not impressed with either his demeanor or his prices he decided that we must be wrong and tried to hang on quoting reductions and discounts available, and when I told him to leave, he tried to be aggressive with us - that we'd conned him to come and give us a quote, just so we could put our business elsewhere. I had to physically gather up his books and papers and briefcase and throw them out of the front door for him to get the message. I told him that I was reporting him and his company to trading standards and he disappeared very quickly. Luckily I kept his business card and used that to notify Trading Standards - his high pressure sales tactics were annoying to us, too (at the time youngish customers) but would be pretty intimidating to someone elderly or on their own.

I'm not sure if it was a scam or not - but the sales pitch was poor, and the prices outrageous. He seemed to think that he was doing us a favour by reducing them to a level even higher than other quotes we'd had.

We eventually got the job done by a company who fitted windows to a friends house, and their price was 1/3 of the the ones quoted by the Cowboy.