A minor curiosity...

The other day I received an email apparently emanating from the office of the Town Clerk of the Town of New Baltimore, NY, population three-and-a-half thousand. I have never set foot in New York state, and would probably not have heard of the town if not for the egregiously disreputable activities of one of its most justly reviled residents, recently an aspirant to the Roman Catholic diaconate. So I might well have wondered why the Town Clerk of this bustling metropolis, a Ms Janet Brooks, would want to write to me. I might have, but I didn’t: it was obvious to me straight away that the said wannabe deacon, wannabe judge, wannabe consumer advocate and wannabe translator was behind it.

Here is the full text of the email (telephone number masked):

Can you be reached at 08 xxxxxxxx?

Thank you

No name, no signature, no suggestion of a reason for wanting to contact me by telephone. Nothing. Now how stupid does Mr Wannabe think I am? More to the point: How stupid is Mr Wannabe? But it gets funnier. Out of curiosity, I made as if to reply, just to see what the return email address was. Any guesses? Would you believe <hvadney@mhcable.com>? You couldn’t get much more inept an attempt at email forgery than that! (For the record, here are a few things he could have done differently, without any additional technical knowledge: choose a more plausible alleged sender, write a more plausible email giving some reason why the alleged sender wants to contact me, set up a freemail address that looks as though it might belong to the alleged sender and is not obviously connected with the real sender....)

The telephone number was that of my parents in Adelaide, without the country code. This guy seems determined to prove that I am still living at my parents’ house, thirty years after I moved out (it was November 1976, in fact), even though he knows it isn’t true.

There was another dead giveaway. According to the header, the email was addressed to two recipients. One was my normal email address, for which email from the wannabe Ralph Nader’s address is filtered; the other was to the address given at the top of this blog (<Richard_Benham_AU-StopVadneysLies[at]yahoo.com>), which I have instructed Mr Wannabe to use if he feels he absolutely must contact me. Of course, I only received one copy, and that was the one addressed to the “StopVadneysLies” address.

On the subject of consumer advocacy: I thought the whole idea was to make a fuss about other people’s being hard done by!

ΔOKEI ΔE MOI KAI TON ’OYAΔNEION MH ’EINAI