THE first inkling I had that someone in cyberspace was pretending to be me came in an early morning phone call from a friend in Aberdeen. He was very relieved to hear my voice, he said, because it assured him that I was not in Turkey where, apparently, I and my family had been mugged and left stranded without the wherewithal to return to Blighty. Thereafter the calls and emails arrived by the flock, like Canada geese.
At first the knowledge that my email address book had been hacked into was mildly alarming. My Turkish impersonator was clearly adept at pulling the wool over folks’ eyes. His plea was more sophisticated than most and the sum he asked for, £1550, was a lot but not unreasonable given that it was designed to rescue me from a parlous situation. “I need you to help me out with a fast loan to settle hotel bills,” the other me pleaded, “and also need to pick up a voucher ticket at the counter for us to catch a flight back home here.” Apparently, I was writing in a local library.
One friend, a top lawyer, read this request while distracted in the midst of a meeting and was so alarmed she contacted another friend and intimated her willingness to open her cheque book and despatch whatever it took to save me from a terrible fate. The way she described what had supposedly happened was similar to the scenario of the movie Midnight Express in which an American college student ends up in a foul Turkish clink with little prospect of release. The friend to whom she related this horror story tried to reassure her. “I don’t think Alan’s in Turkey,” he said. “The last I heard he was supposed to be in Pitlochry.”
As the morning wore on I received ever more calls and emails, often from people I hadn’t heard from for a while. It was like Christmas but without the shopping. Their concern was touching and their generosity restored my faith in humankind. “Just let me know how much you need?” was their general tenor. Of course most of them had suspected that I was a victim of a “phishing exercise” designed to extract cash from the well-meaning and gullible. What gave the hacker away, it seemed, was the style and tone in which he wrote. He named no names and gave no details that could be checked. His vagueness was transparent. Moreover, as my old college roommate observed, “I knew it couldn’t be you. Three exclamations in a row!” Thus is justified the art of literary criticism.
In order to reassure me that I was not alone in being picked on, a polyglot in Argyll related how he had once in New Oxford Street in London given “a well-dressed Nigerian gentleman a tenner to help him get back to his sick wife in Nigeria”. The following week he came across the same man in the same place in the same street with the same request. “Second time round, he was rather spooked when I replied in Hausa, one of the inheritances of my father, who spoke it well and could spot a northern Nigerian at a hundred paces.”
Still more calls and emails came in from near and far. I could not help but notice, though, that my own family, who apparently shared my plight, were not rushing to my aid. Needless to say, this will have consequences. One kind friend wondered, if I really was stranded in Turkey, whether that would affect a talk I am due to give at a book festival.
Yet another friend who knows Turkey well exchanged emails with the con man and asked him to confirm – “just for safety’s sake” – my wife’s name and my job description. “OMG!” came the reply, “you should understand i will never ask you to for help if i wasn’t myself. I’m in this for real and i have been finding it very difficult to make call oversea from here...Let me know!”
“Heavens!” replied my friend, showing that he too could throw exclamation marks around like confetti. “Are the children all right? I’ll let your mother know! Where are you in Turkey? I have friends in Ankara who can help!”
This did the trick. The con man, convinced that my friend was about to send cash, gave him an address in Istanbul to which it should be sent. My friend responded by saying that because I was already in Istanbul he would arrange a hotel in which myself and my family could stay and would wire money to the British consul. Also, he added, he had informed the police, whereupon all communication came to a swift end.
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