The Guardian ran an interesting piece about a scam centre in Myanmar today.
Not that long ago I finally got round to emptying out the paltry amount that was in my UK bank account, which I’ve been meaning to do since Brexit meant I had to pretend to them I still lived there. I had to phone the bank’s international helpline over a small problem (no longer a major task for a deaf person thanks to a very useful app!) and the guy in the call centre asked some questions to check that I wasn’t a possible scam victim. Questions of a “has anyone influenced you into making this withdrawal?” nature. I mentioned to him that I’d been watching a YouTube channel called Catfished. To my surprise, he’d not only heard of it, but said “I think everybody should watch that”. I agree, it’s very instructive, especially if you know any elderly or bewildered people who might get scammed. There are some other good channels detailing common scams too. I know the Massive are all far too [insert appropriate adjective here] to fall for any such thing, but everyone probably knows someone who could be vulnerable, whether through age, loneliness, grief or mental health. (Some victims, it can’t be denied, are just plain stupid!)
On the Catfished channel, which deals almost exclusively with “romance scams”, some of the victims are ridiculously “naive” (“Johnny Depp wants to marry me, but I have to send him money for the flight over”). But some of the scams are very well put together. The scammer befriends then woos the victim over a period of time (weeks, months, even years) and mentions making a lot of money through investing, then uses a (sometimes) very convincing fake bank account and a fake bitcoin wallet and suggests the victim try a small investment. The investment shows remarkable profit in a short space of time, so of course the victim wants to invest more. Usually, a lot more! Then, when they’ve seemingly accumulated hundreds of thousands of profit in their account, they try to make a withdrawal and are told about the withdrawal fee of 40,000, the commission of 7%, the tax that has to be paid, etc. And obviously, the more the victim has paid, the more reluctant they are to write it all off as a scam. They keep paying. Even after the scam is revealed, many of the victims on the channel still hold onto the belief that the scammer might have some sort of conscience about their victims’ losses. Some victims say “I want to know why he did this!”, when the answer could not be more blatantly obvious.
Please D.M. me your bank account number and mother’s maiden name if you would like any further information at a cost of just 10 pence.
Yeah happened on EastEnders recently
I was annoyed when I was forced to close my UK bank account. I had had one with the same bank for 43 years, am a British citizen, but I didn’t live there (but may do so one day again)
People live in virtual worlds and want them to be real. They always have. Don’t. You attract exploitative folk and the ungrounded. Though I’m a delightful catch, no 20 year old girl is going to fall for my scholarship, paunch of prosperity, or wealth of rock n roll anecdotes relating to bands from 50 years ago. (Nor a 40 year old, actually.). Nor should you buy magic beans. I always send a phone seller way with a flea in his ear. What I hate are the plausible phishing sites, which get more sophisticated all the time.
Excellent idea for a discussion @Gary.
I read that Guardian article and was gob-smacked. The description of the scam camps was like a terrifying sci fi novel.
We all like to think we are too clever to be scammed. But at this very moment there might be some one who is slowly gaining our confidence in preparation for a scam..,,
I know exactly who you’re thinking of and I agree. Best avoid the Wordle threads.
I had some underwhelming scam spam recently…
Beloved Dear,
You have been listed as a beneficiary for 2.5 EU
I recall an article in Wired years ago about this sort of call-centre-type scam outfit. It was in Nigeria, IIRC, which was at the time the centre of the “a prince will give you a fortune if you just help him out via your bank account” scam.
The article pointed that those who worked in the place were employed (not trafficked, an idea that fills me with horror at the cruelty involved), and said that every few minutes they would send thousands of emails to possible victims. If just one person from among those many thousands fell for the scam, it would cover the place’s costs for the day. And it was a rare day when only one person fell for it…
It seems in South-East Asia there’s a lot of human trafficking involved and people being forced to work in scam centres. On the Catfished channel, most of the scammers are from Lagos, Nigeria.
I get a dozen or so calls a week that are trying to scam me. I don’t answer and I block them immediately. They are sophisticated enough to spoof the phone number so that it appears to be local or even e.g. the name of a bank appears on your display.
I was telephoned by ‘Graham’ at ‘Microsoft’ saying our computer had been compromised and was I sat at the computer.
“Unfortunately I have a steam-powered computer and could you ring back in half an hour after I’ve put some more coal on it to get it up to power”
He actually rang back “is your computer working now?”
“Yes”
“Could you press the windows key”
“What’s that”
“It’s a key with a windows symbol on it”
“No can’t see one”
This carried on a while until I finally said “I’m on an Apple and if you don’t know what system I’m using why don’t you sod off and stop trying to scam”
If the phone rings my wife answers it tells me the number and I just check up on the Internet the number and who’s calling. Invariably it’s a scam call.
I never answer my phone to anybody. Ever. One of the many advantages of being deaf.
Just like to point out she tells me the number not ‘it’. I blame my editor.
I never answer my landline phone. The answering machine requests that the caller leaves a message, which of course scammers and cold callers never do.
I’m considering changing my message to “Calls to this number are never ever picked up in person. If you are not trying to sell me something or scam me, call me on my mobile number, which you should know if you know me. Leave your number and what you want if it’s important. I might call you back. Or maybe I won’t.”
On my mobile I only accept calls from numbers that I know are legit.
I get the occasional text warning me that if I don’t pay my parking fine soon I’ll be subject to court action. I might, just might, find them more convincing if I was a driver.
Hilarious @Gatz.
The scammers of today are such incompetent rascals. Not like the good, old days when they’d sell you the Eiffel Tower.
I had 30 grand taken from my account. It was done in Saudi (at which point I hadn’t visited). Evidently someone skimmed my card. It was refunded but took NatWest 6 weeks to do it. I asked the bank if someone had borrowed and copied my card but they said they didn’t need it … still none the wiser how it was done.
A common scam used to be that crooked staff in shops, restaurants etc. had a second card reader as well as the legit one. Nowadays nobody else gets to handle the card in such places but the customer, so that wouldn’t work any more.
A possible scam would be a variation on the fake card reader that scammers install onto cashpoints.
When you use it your card details and PIN get copied for later use by the scammers, but you get your cash, receipt etc. from the machine as normal and you get your card back. As if nothing at all was untoward.
My name and address leaked out from somewhere, and have endured nearly 12 to 14 months of “Please pay your overdue Car Insurance” or “Your vehicle was involved in an accident” or “you have been caught on speeding camera”.
Have markedly reduced from the 5 or 6 every Saturday, but still coming through.
Action Fraud reporting has got easier, CIFAS on Credit Check flags and stops quite a lot, but they’re still coming.
Annoying, and at one point last year, I couldn’t actually get Car Insurance in my own name for my own vehicle (too many concern flags raised).
Think the worst is over … now it’s random “Your Shopify code is …” texts, like someone somewhere is trying to scam me.
Just hang up without a word up and block the caller. I used to enjoy engaging with them and giving them what-for but the scammer is probably being exploited too. Also, if they know that the number is real, it’s verified on their system and you’re ripe for another go in the future.
We have a landline and when it rings, it’s always a scammer. So it just rings out now, not answered. We still have it in the unlikely event of earthquakes/tsunamis or cyber warfare destroying the cloud. It doesn’t cost anything.
Lists of bonafide numbers that get answered are compiled and sold on to other scammers.
Sometimes the simplest are the ones people fall for. At work someone got my name off the company website and sent accounts ‘can you pay this today’ – my name on the email but a scam address. Accounts fell for it.
One of the advantages of an I- phone is that it sends a legion of e mails straight to spam/junk, most of which claim I have been disconnected, or will be, from a legion of mysterious sites that have all my cloud info, pictures etc etc etc. I send em all to the bin every couple of weeks.
I just wonder the defence of, should any be bona fide, saying it went straight to spam?
gmail has a very effecfive spam filter, you don’t need an i-anything, just a phone or a browser.
I have another mailbox, as well as gmail.
Yep Gmail works pretty well for me, even if it is a bit overzealous at times.
I recently received an email which appeared to be from BT/EE which is my broadband supplier. The subject line referred to a ‘Terms & Conditions Update’ which is not an unusual type of email to receive. However, the BT address didn’t look quite right and the language in the body of the email wasn’t convincing. I didn’t hit the link and decided to delete & block. I also called BT/EE. The person I spoke to agreed with my suspicions and told me that this was the 3rd such call she had received that morning. I told her I still remembered a bit of advice my dad gave me many years ago – ‘when in doubt, stop!’. Semper Vigilo
That’s the basic good practice – check the email sender address. If it don’t look right, dump it and get on with life.
Email is so full of security risks it’s not true. It’s easy to spoof the ‘From’ address when an email is sent, for example. Best practice is to use an email reader that will allow you to only render the email message in plain text (i.e. no links etc, just ASCII text characters) so that you can see what the gist is without downloading anything you might not want to click on. Thunderbird does this, and is free and constantly being updated by the group of geeks who look after it. I’ve been using it for years now, and it gets better all the time. You do not need Outlook in your life. Even better practice is to use something like MailWasherPro that will just grab the email headers from your server without grabbing any of the actual message – which is where any malicious payload, if there is one, will be lurking, or a link to it. It will check inbound emails against known and likely spam sources and flag them accordingly. Once you’re happy with the email you can just launch whatever application you use to read your email messages directly from within MailWasherPro. Google it and see how it works as a safety checking zone between the incoming emails on your email server and whatever nasties they might contain.
Save all junk calls as junk
I never get spam. The only emails that occasionally end up in my spam filter are proper emails from people I know.
I don’t have a mobile phone, only a landline and the only phone calls that I would call “scams” that I get are the ones from my broadband/phone line provider trying to get me to upgrade to things I don’t need.
I’ve recently had a load of mails from British Gas warning me that I haven’t paid and it will be disconnected imminently. Thing is, I live in Singapore…
See also mails from DVLA, EE and various parking companies.
Whilst we all feel that we are savvy enough not to fall for scams there are times when you can get caught off guard. I was almost scammed by ‘Vodafone’; it was quite sophisticated but the key was that I was very distracted at the time by life’s pressures and fell for it. Bottom line was that the real Vodafone contacted me to say they thought I’d been scammed and the situation was remedied.
God help us when our marbles have all left the building.
Totally agree. I don’t subscribe to the view in the OP that “some victims are plain stupid”. I think there’s types of scam we will see coming a mile off for, but it just takes the right the sort catching you when you are distracted, unaware or just a bit vulnerable.
I know someone who got caught by the plea via a hacked Facebook account to send money because they’d “lost their phone”. It was entirely bogus and the sort of thing their daughter had done in the past, and requests for help via Messenger were fairly usual. We’re all just one call from being duped.
Some people can be exceptionally delusional, believing everything they’re told in spite of overwhelming and indisputable evidence to the contrary.
Take this 59-year-old who apparently believed Jennifer Aniston was in love with him and wanted to marry him but needed money to pay for the wedding dress. This after he was previously scammed out of $12,000. He talks about it rationally. He may not be a stupid man, but there’s no denying he’s being stupid.
If he’s being stupid to this extent – twice – I think we can safely say he’s stupid.
I think people make bad decisions, sometimes repeatedly so. Some are naive. This book changed my thinking about the general trend on social media for victim blaming mostly because it can result in people doubling down when they have suspicions because of the stigma attached to saying “I’ve been had”.
Thanks. I missed your review when you posted it. I think I’ll order the book now after reading it.
I’m very interested in the whole issue at the moment. I’ve been watching a few YouTube channels dedicated to catching scammers.
As I said in the OP, age, loneliness, grief and mental health problems seem to be the most common factors behind victims’ vulnerability. But that doesn’t mean stupidity never plays its part. Having said that, victim shaming is unpleasant and unhelpful (- or is it? Perhaps it could help to make more people more careful?) and while stupidity may make some people vulnerable, of course it’s the scammers who are fully to blame. Though from what I’ve read, many of them are victims themselves.
A thoroughly vile industry throughout. And a massively profitable one. According to the Federal Trade Commission, consumers in the US reported losing more than $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, a 25% increase over 2023. More money was lost to investment scams—$5.7 billion—than any other category.
Before the days of Internet banking I was once rung up at work from the Halifax* saying I’d not paid my credit card bill and would I like to do it now and could I give my details.
After a bit of thought I remembered I’d paid it as I’d been coming back from holiday and had paid it at the Bluewater Shopping centre which had stuck in my mind as it was unusual.
I called in at the police station on the way home and explained what had happened and that it was odd they’d got my work telephone number. There was nothing they could do as no crime had been committed.
* some months later an employee of the Halifax was arrested for various scams bytelephoning people. I realise at the time I should have informed the Halifax too but it was early days for this malarkey.
True story this. I’m a solicitor and do conveyancing. (It’s not UK system so don’t bother asking why we’re doing this a way that’s not quite the same as you’re used to)
Fella comes in, buying a house. I do the AML checks and hand him my bank details, printed on a sheet of A4 paper and say ‘lob the deposit into that account, you’ve signed the contract’ that’ll mean that you’re cracking on. Sure enough, two days later 20K lands safely. Hurrah
few months later, need to get the balance and I sent him a mail on a Monday ‘Mike, i need €201542.52 to close the sale, you have my bank details, let me hear when the money’s thru’
Nothing tuesday. Nothing Wednesday, Nothing Thursday and so lunchtime i rang him wondering if all was ok.
‘NO, all good, my wife’s on her way to the bank to transfer the money to you…’
‘cool, good man, that’s great, bye…’
‘c’mere, you changed your bank details did you?’
‘yeah, bye, no what, wait WHAT DID YOU SAY?’
‘i got an email from you last night said that your bank details have changed…’
‘i didn’t send any such mail’
‘well i got it’
‘where’s your wife’
‘on way to the bank’
‘ok, hang up, don’t let her near the bank….’
as luck would have it, Mike’s wife got stuck in traffic and crisis was averted but he sent me the mail he got and it was my letter head and my regular bank detals stripped out and replaced with details of an account where, no doubt soon as 200K plus shrapnel landed, would be Christ-knows-where within minutes.
There’s a massive thing in caps on my bank details sheet now saying that if you don’t check wiht me before sending money, and it gets ‘lost’ it’s not on me.
When I was a young bank clerk, a very old lady came in and spoke to me about some items on her statement. Many old people that just came in for a chat, particularly with my charismatic and popular colleague, David. I thought she was in that category, but she was very clear that the charges on her statement weren’t right.
I remember being a little patronising by suggesting she goes off to have a cup of tea somewhere while we looked into it. I regret that. I assumed all would be explained away quite easily.
Long story short – David, who was off work that day, had been deducting money out of her account and when you followed the trail of paperwork this money ended up in a bank account in David’s name. Not much money – but that’s not the point. It was very strange.
It kickstarted a whole inquiry over what had been going on. It turns out David had been doing this for years at the expense of dozens of elderly customers. He had embezzled thousands of pounds. He admitted it and went to prison.
I was pleased about this because he was a bit of a twat to underlings like me. To the customers though, he was a lovely chap and the old ladies in particular loved him. He switched it off and on in an instant.
The main thing I learned was not to be dismissive of older people ever again. She was absolutely right and I really cringe at the “cup of tea” memory.
Social engineering, innit.
I mean, so much stuff we see of hackery etc, and what we think of hacking, computers’n’all…it’s a drop in the ocean. The *real* hacking is David’s brand of inveigling
An old girl friend of mine from when we were teaching in Zimbabwe now lives in Johannesburg in difficult circumstances. Occasionally I send money. Her preferred provider is Western Union.
The hoops I have to go to each time to send her the money. Multiple callers asking multiple questions, often the same ones. One payment was for a funeral and I had to crack it over the delay.
I get it of course. Older bloke sending money to a woman in Africa. Reeks of scam.
If your friend’s difficult circs include not doing phone banking then this won’t work of course…but I send pension money to myself from Blighty every month via xe.com. Couldn’t be easier – I just set up a transfer on xe, shoot the money over from the bank according to xe procedure, and off it goes. It often gets to my account here the next day, no questions asked, and it’s free over £1000, 3 quid if under.
The large-scale scams tend to generate more news, but some of the smaller scams are quite ingenious – precisely because service providers don’t really care.
As an example: a few years ago, I noticed my mobile phone bills were slightly higher each month than normal (literally £4 higher) , but I didn’t pay much attention to it. When I finally checked the itemised bills, I’d been receiving advertising texts, for which I was being charged £4 per text. When I contacted 3, their operative told me – and I’m quoting directly – ‘You must’ve clicked on something.’ I explained that GDPR/DPA doesn’t work that way: consent needs to be provable. If I parked my banger on someone’s drive and stuck a bill for £38,000 through their door, the police wouldn’t say, ‘You must’ve signed something.’ 3 even said they couldn’t block the texts; I told them I wouldn’t be paying any further bills. They’d been profiting from the proceeds of crime (it helped that I was out of contract). In the end, 3 repaid me all the lost money, and they found an email address for the company who’d been sending the texts. Within five minutes of me emailing the company a screenshot and asking them for evidence of consent, I received a call from a withheld number…and I received a cheque reimbursing me for the lost amount two days later.
If they’d only been skimming £1, I doubt I’d ever have noticed. Do that to 3000 people a month, and it’s a full-time wage. I did some online reading about similar cases, and some people never get reimbursed – I was lucky that I could threaten to go to another phone provider.
There was a similar scam going on with Spotify a few years ago..? From memory, Mrs. T asked me how long my subscription had gone up, and I knew nothing about it. It was taking about £3 or so more a month I think – Spotty rectified it and I got a refund no problem.
I’ve lost count of the number of times my McAfee subscription / Microsoft subscription (neither of which I have) have been about to expire, although the remedy is merely to click on a badly spelt link. I owe thousands of pounds to the Inland Revenue according to some bloke in an Indian call centre who keeps ringing me. I’ve been lucky enough to win a car and a large house in the country, and all I need to do to claim them is hand over my bank details to someone I’ve never heard of. The court costs for a case I’ve never been involved in are well overdue, and I would benefit from longer lasting erections if only I covered myself in some toxic substance or committed large amounts of money for a penis extension.
The last one’s true though.
>>sound of guffawing<<
You always promised me you’d keep that to yourself.
Tangentially related, I remember an interview some years ago with an industrial spy, whose preferred “scam” was to send an (apparently) brand new iPad to his target organisation’s IT department with a cover letter saying they’d won the iPad in a prize draw at a recent IT conference… nine times out of ten, the head of department would claim it and add their work email etc. to it, at which point the pre-installed spyware would kick in and enable the spy to browse through their emails, documents and so on at their leisure…
That is a wonderful and extremely believable story @metal-mickey.
We all like to think we can win a fantastic prize without any effort-
The other classic was to lose a few USB memory drives in the car park of a company. Some will be found and someone will plug it in to their computer just to see who had lost it.
When The Light lost a cable-connecting doohickey in the internal bodywork of her car we found a USB stick in the same cavity. I plugged it into my laptop, scanned it, and opened it. Most of the files were MP3s of pop songs, but there was another folder, entitled simply ‘new folder’ … it contained about 50 pictures of horses and show jumping.
(Took a few years, Murgatroyd, but I think we’re finally in………)
Telling someone on Facebook what your first car was will not give them your password but if you farm every single reply it certainly increases the chances of you finding one or two by putting it through an automated programme that’s takes one second.
When we used to use our landline I’d get at least one ‘Hello, I’m calling from Microsoft. We’ve spotted a security issue’ scam call every other day.
I’m not of the Police but as civil servant with a particular function I work with the police. So, working from home, I would always wind up them up by saying something like ‘oh no, this is bad. Will it affect my work laptop too? I work for the police…’.
Click. Buzz.
That sounds like a very effective deterrent @Beezer.
Oddly enough, I’ve just been the target of a scam attempt this evening,
I got a text message supposedly from one of Mrs KFD’s younger relatives, asking if i could help him out by sending 200 quid to some person he knew so thst he could buy a table.
i replied. Not a chance.
And 20 minutes later i go an apologetic message from him telling me he’d been hacked.
I had the Microsoft guy. Hissing line, heavy accent, I just put the phone down. It rang again and he said “did you just hang up on me?”. I said, “yes, you’re a scammer” and hung up again. It rang a third time and he said “I can’t believe you did that when I’m trying to help you. You are very rude”. This time I switched the radio on and put the hand set next to it. A few minutes later he had gone.
Just had an email to say there has been a request to change my Instagram password which I haven’t requested.
Have you got an Instagram account?
I had one of those notifications recently, and I’m not on The Insta
I have which I rarely use though recently I’ve put a bit more stuff on.
A couple of days ago, I received an ‘Instagram’ Whatsapp text which said something like ‘your verification code is 123456…’ I didn’t open it and deleted it immediately. I have never held an Instagram account and don’t even have the app on my phone or on any other device which I use. I have had a heightened sense of awareness these days regarding any online communications. Another one of my late father’s life tips, ‘trust no-one’.
The BBC programme, Scam Interceptors’ from Glasgow is quite an eye/ear opener and gives a few common sense tips:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00164f1
I’ve had a bloke call me twice this morning, who had received calls from my number with what he said sounded like an automated message from his bank. On the second call, I assured him it wasn’t me and told him to block my number. But now I am assuming I will have to change my number now some shitweasels have hijacked it. Gahh.
Maybe I’m being naive here, but the one thing that all modern scams have in common is that money is transferred (either by the victim or by the scammer after a hack etc) electronically.
This means that there MUST be an electronic “paper trail” of where the money has gone. Why can’t more be done to trace these and either block / return transfers or identify the scammers. I realise that these transfers are usually international, but “most” countries are friendly these days, so why can’t they work together ?
On a couple of the YouTube channels out to bust the scammers they try and trace the money as much as they can. The biggest problem seems to be that the money, once received, is very quickly transferred around the globe via “money mules” – themselves unwitting scam victims duped into money laundering. The use of shell companies and cryptocurrencies further obfuscates the trail. And not all the countries involved are equally cooperative or have robust anti-money laundering measures in place (looking at you, Burma).
My big question at the moment is: with literally billions of dollars involved, are the YouTubers who try and bust these scammers not putting themselves in serious danger by posting their videos?
Converting the spoils to crypto as quickly as possible makes following the money trail pretty much impossible.
As I sit and read today’s no posts, ping goes my phone messages: “Dad, save this number” and some random number. I always ask if it is Wilfred or Ailsa, strangely seldom getting a reply. And then I cancel it. My daughter, who isn’t Ailsa, used to lose her phone a lot, but hasn’t for several years, and my son wouldn’t bother letting me know, he’d just get a new one and add the same number he has always had.
I fell for one once. I was selling something on Reverb.com, a musical instruments marketplace site which I hadn’t used before. After a day I received a message via the Reverb messaging service saying I needed to register my credit card in order to receive payments. it looked exactly like a Reverb admin screen. OK, I thought, and registered my card. Then….I thought about it and contacted the Support – inevitably a chat bot. It was enough to establish that this was a scam, and I swiftly froze my card. No harm done.
Fast forward a few months. Tried to sell something else. Another, different, scam. This time I was spry and dodged it – but I’m not using Reverb again. Hacker ridden environment.
I haven’t had a spammer phone me for a while. If I have time and I’m in the mood a will string them along.
With one caller, I acted like a simple minded fool, repeatedly getting his instructions wrong – though I wasn’t actually doing anything at all. It got to the stage that he was started shouting down the line at me. I acted hurt and said I was trying hard to get it right but would hang up if he didn’t apologise. He apologised. Then we carried on for a few more minutes. He asked me to spell out letter by letter exactly what I had typed. I replied “w, w, w, d, o, t,” He yelled down the phone “You motherfucker”. I had time to get the words “Got you shithead” before he hung up.
Another rang me while I was having breakfast, claiming there was a problem with my router. I asked him to hang on because I would have to boot up the computer. I put the phone down, continued with my breakfast, washed things up and got back to him.
He’d hung on.
I told him he was absolutely right and my router wasn’t working. He asked me to reboot it. I told him that this would take some time and to hold on.
Five to ten minutes later he was still there. I said I’d rebooted.
He started giving me instructions and asking me what was on the screen after I’d hit enter. I told him the screen was blank.
After a couple more tries he asked what was on the screen.
“A picture of Bugs Bunny” I replied.
“You think you’re funny man, but I’m smarter than you” he said.
To which I replied “But not smart enough to realise that I’ve been stringing you along because you’re so greedy to get at my money”.
To which I got the surprising response “You owe me money, man”
I asked how that came about and he told me that my ancestors had stolen a diamond from his ancestors. I guess he was thinking of the Koh-i-noor.
I told him that couldn’t be possible and started giving him a history lesson about The Highland Clearances.
He hung up.
recent Facebook post of mine:
Call from Number Withheld.
Apparently calling from the Hospital.
They’ve changed their computer systems and need to confirm my file details.
“You’re calling from a withheld number asking me to confirm details to some rando. Does that sound like good security to you?
As I said, we’ve changed system…
“Yeah. Nah”
There’s a lot I’ll miss about Alice – rampant stupidity isn’t one of them. It probably was the hospital; they have changed their system. But over the phone, number withheld?