The World wide web is a vast tropical jungle. Before the advent of this convenient medium of worldwide communication, the poor beggars of the Twentieth Century had to huddle on the London pavement, with a torn blanket in front, begging for a few coins from some sympathetic passersby. That is passe. Now you get web begging spam mail by thousands. So and so is suffering from such and such disease and urgently requires a huge sum of money for treatment. Please send the money to my account , or ring me on this number, etc, etc. I do wonder if the recipient of this mail would not wonder how a person who has easy access to the internet and can afford a desktop or laptop, has hit so low as to beg for a living on the Web.it may be the Great European Depression. Some persons are so dirt poor that they are able to go on the internet to solicit funds, with open hands and expect that some fools would fall for the sob stories and wire them hard earned money. While half the World makes money, the other half lazes along and lives off the hard earners , the classic ant and grasshopper story. Nowadays the grasshopper has become a web locust.
And then comes along absolute web frauds, who offer money spinning methods that a mentally retarded snail would not fall for. I recently got a mail from some bloke trying to interest me in supplying some kind of herbal extract, which he claimed he has already found a supplier, but he has no money, does not want his company to find out, only wants a banker to pay for the consignment, will offer a commission and so on. The whole thing sucks and is a big scam. Luckily the mail server has dumped this in the spam bag and issued a red band warning . Yet we do find a few idiots falling for the dangled bait like a hungry shark snapping at a tuna. On one side you have widows sobbing their hearts away in tear jerking e-mails but in a language that is mostly full of spelling mistakes that identifies the sender's probable nationality as some one comfortably sitting in the scam capital of Rumania. You get mails from some familiar names, screaming that they had been mugged while visiting Spain and needs money urgently. It appears the robber took away everything ,wallets and credit cards, passports and hankies etc. ,leaving behind a very bruised ego. And they expect that before you can say Jack Sparrow, you would send them the money or talk to someone on a dubious hotel number who would tell you how to despatch the sum. Then you get the smart ones who say you have won fabulous amounts and wants to know how to send it to you, bank details of course included! Then the old Nigerian scam of seeking your urgent help in transferring large sums money out of the country.
The Pirates who sneak around on the Web are just as dangerous cut throats, as the 'black beards' who once roamed the Caribbean Sea. This time they are after your bank account and credit cards not doubloons and pieces of eight. Since this is also piracy, we have to bring back the harsh punishment for cyber begging and piracy: hang them on the yardarm or make them walk the plank.
The latter method is better, as we can feed them to the Great White Sharks, and prevent their extinction. And if you get unsolicited mail from bums and tramps, just dump them in the trash can. And burn your credit cards and stop using internet banking. Go back to using hard cash: euros or dollars or pounds or lira or yen or yuans. When someone asks for money via e mail, send them a picture of Benjamin Franklin and give this legend under it: "Go fly a kite when the lightning strikes"! Probably the greedy beggar would send a reply mail, demanding that you give him money to buy a kite!
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