My new travelling companion, who on the morning we were due to leave Chiang Mai had acquired an ominous pair of high heels outside his room which didn’t bode well for our 9am departure, slept like the buddha during the 2-day boat trip up the Mekong from Huay Xai to Luang Prabang.Slumped on a table, sprawled across some rice bags or just on the floor in everyone’s way, Markus mastered sleep as we moseyed up the river to the sleepiest town on the South East Asia tourist circuit. As my Lonely Planet says, time slows down when you come to Laos from Thailand. People walk slower, talk quieter, and even the tuk-tuk drivers can’t really be bothered. Only my remaining internet time, ticking down to zero in the bottom right corner of my screen, is in a hurry.
I met Markus on the Mr Whisky trek, which took a few days to come together thanks to the post-protest tourism drought in Thailand. We needed at least three people on board for the trek to be possible, and I was alone on the list for about three days before our ‘SpicyThai too far’ tuk-tuk lady sidetracked Markus and Thomas to Chiangmai Inn. As the three of us sat down for the trek’s evening-before briefing, Dave and Marie jumped on board. Dave, as it happens, was in the seat next to me on my flight from Heathrow a week earlier. Now he was checked into the room next to mine, courtesy of our consistently impressive tuk-tuk lady.
An Israeli girl, a vegetarian, I’ve since met was disgusted by her river boat guide in Vietnam when he scooped a snake from the waters and popped it in his full whisky bottle, where it squirmed for a while and drowned. Creepy crawlies bring great health benefits when soaked in whisky in this part of the world, and I didn’t do my budding friendship with Sapphira much justice when I explained to her that on my Chiang Mai trek we caught a tarantula and drank whisky from its carcass before cooking it on a campfire the next day and snacked on its legs.
I set my alarm for 5.30am for a 6am start to our three-day trek. We jumped in the back of a four-by-four with our monsoon-proof backpacks and ricocheted between the railings in our rickety 3-hour drive out of civilization. We stopped at a nameless place, at a small Karen village, where we had noodles and coke for lunch before being shown to a household, a musty kitchen-bedroom duplex, and introduced to their tenants. There was a wood fire burning in the kitchen and the smoke stung our eyes. We had a go on their bomboo bong, smoking a tasteless root of a tree which apparently relieves headaches. After all our daft questions about the “bong thing” our Karen host learned the useful English word bongting and was pleased enough with our company to give us the bong (easy enough to make a new one next time he’s in the forest) and some root for the road.
He accompanied us for a little while, just to the edge of the ambiguous borders of the village where he showed us how to trap animals. First a small noose trap for small mammals, then a bigger one for large rats, and finally a deadly spear trap for wild boars, or even tigers. We carried on up some steep slopes, cutting up any impeding jungle with our knives, stopping here and there to learn about plants that come in handy in various situations. This one for stomach pains, this one for fevers, this one to light camp fires, this to swing on Tarzan-style for a bit of fun. At around five, we arrived at an elephant taxi stand where we exchanged sugar cubes for rides. Just as it started pissing it down with the obligatory evening monsoon, the jungle opened up onto some paddy fields and we dragged our soggy feet to a Hmong encampment, our home for the night.
Even after two deafening cracks of the rifle, two missed shots, the animal kept its spot in the canopy, a pair of eyes gleaming like raindrops in the darkness, reflecting the light from our head torches, giving itself up. The gun traveled to Thomas for the third shot. The animal indulged him, kept looking with its signpost eyes, as he took his time steadying and aiming, then bang, bright sparks, whiff of gunpowder, scattered leaves, and finally it came tumbling down through the tree’s layers. It was like freeing a frisbee from a park tree. I rushed to the plop and found the small flying squirrel on its side, eyes three-quarters closed, breathing shallowly. It’s alive! You have to kill it! I had no idea how and the thought scared me a little but hesitating would be cruel. I grabbed the nearest weapon, a moldy branch, and smashed it over our prey. The branch shattered into smithereens, the squirrel lived on, and Markus, as if he knew what he was doing, knelt down on one knee and pressed the point of his knife vertically down into its neck. Is, our guide, was still reloading the rifle, letting the4 children play. When she finally strolled over to inspect the prize, she seemed pretty unmoved. Not a lot of meat on this one. She picked it up like a toy, spread its wings, and revealed a tiny, hardly bloody wound in its chest . The gun was loaded with a cluster of small pellets that sprays out towards the target when the trigger’s pulled. All it takes is for one of those to hit a minor animal like this to send it falling.
The guy who greeted me at Chiangmai Inn, Mr Whisky, seemed pretty pissed off by my Bangkok cynicism. Getting off my sleeper carriage train at Chiang Mai at eight in the morning, I breached a two-layered wall of touts and tuk-tuk drivers at the end of the platform before giving in to a confusingly female tout-cum-driver just outside the station. She said I should go to a certain guest house. I said no thanks, I plan to go to hostel called SpicyThai where I’m going to find the guy I accidentally gave 500 baht to on my England-USA night out on Khao San Road. SpicyThai too far. She showed me her map, and sure enough, it was a little out of the way, so I said ok then, take me to the government tourist information centre and I’ll take it from there. I hopped on her tuk-tuk and a couple of genial exchanges and back streets later, I ended up at Chiangmai Inn.
200 baht for an en-suite room seemed a little too good to be true, so I said to Mr Whisky, who was sat in front of a big board of trekking photos and prices, this is too cheap for a private room. Am I going to be tied into a trekking tour to get the price? What are you talking about, man?! Trekking tour has nothing to do with room. Trekking tour different. Take it, leave it, I don’t care. It sounded like a good deal so I checked in for one night and took my first shower in over two days from the comfort of my new room.
The rain that decimated Lub D’s satellite coverage of the South Africa-Mexico match had stopped and it was a hot, relatively dry day on my first day in Bangkok. I got up at eleven and headed out with the vague intention of catching a boat up the river to the tourist centre with all the big buddha statues and other cultural obligations. I walked West, which meant that at some point I would end up at the river. For a while I enjoyed the streets enough to shrug off two or three tuk-tuk offers. Then came Tuk-Tuk Tony, along with the whim to my head that, actually, a tuk-tuk ride is an experience that embodies the spirit of the city and one I should embrace right away.
So I hopped on for 20 baht- a ride, I though, to the river pier via some local temples for some sightseeing. And then there were shops- three of them. First a small travel agent, which if I stayed in and showed interest for over five minutes, Tuk-Tuk Tony gets some petrol vouchers for in commission. Stay long time, please, long time, for me, to help me. Of course Tuk-Tuk Tony, it’s a hot day and business hasn’t been great lately after the Red Shirt protests, of course I’ll help. So I went in, got my notebook out and took notes as the travel agent told me about trekking in Chiang Mai. Then I was taken to a tailor, a suit shop. Again, I diligently went in with my notebook and took down notes as the tailor told me about the different cuts of fabric and prices. He looked pretty suspicious, but why should I be in the wrong? In the third shop, another travel agent, the guy at the desk busted me with the business cards I’d received from the other travel agent and tailor as I opened my notebook for a third time. Hegot up and sent me to the door. If I’m not going to buy, go now, otherwise he will have to pay the driver 300 baht. You want to pay me 300 baht? No, so I left. Next stop was the final stop, some sort of impressive tourist attraction which I didn’t go into, near-ish to a pier but not the right one. It was getting late, too late to make it to Wat Pho before closing time, so I strolled back to the hostel, guided by a very tall Sofitel that stood next to it in the distance. Back at the hostel, everyone had been through the same tuk-tuk shop routine on their first days.
Today, Mr Whisky’s sales pitch for his special trek costing four times the average street price, went something like this. If I go into the centre of Chiang Mai I’ll be bombarded by touts to go on treks, but all of them are working off commission for the same handful of organisers who have been running the same trekking schemes for 30 years. He pointed at two close-by towns on the map, Mae Rim and Hang Dong, said that all treks go to one of these two places, renting the same elephants from the same farms and visiting the same mountain communities who after all these tours have learned to supersize their share of the touristic tart by dressing up super-indigenously and posing in photos for baht. His treks are carefully planned to give a ‘non touristic’ experience, led by committed, knowledgeable, and long-established guides who understand the ecosystems of the places we’d be trekking to. He pointed to an unmarked place on the map, and said that the people here will be our hosts, people who haven’t been tainted by Bangkok and mass tourism.
Serendipitously, two couples turned up at the entrance to the inn just as his ended his spiel. They’d just come from a Mr Whisky designer trek. Was it worth 6500 baht when the typical price on the street was around 1500? It sounded pretty good, and on his way out one of the guys, a serene English blond with two bars of music tattooed on the underside of his upper right arm, farewelled his tour guide with a kiss on the head, a good look I thought. After my shower I went exploring the area, popping into a few travel agents to see if what Mr Whisky said was accurate. They all had colourful pictures of elephants and huts and rafts and mountain people. And sure enough, when I asked for details inside they all pointed to Mae Rim and Hang Dong on the map.
After lunch, I sat with Mr Whisky back in Chiangmai Inn’s reception where one of the housekeepers was beating a snake with her broom, and worked out a discount on the premium trek. I leave the day after tomorrow at 6.30am, returning two days later in the evening.
After a dry spell, the flow is going again. I’m jumping on a jet plane to Asia tomorrow and won’t be heading back to England until the end of August. I’m really not sure what I want out of my travels, but here goes. Flying into Bangkok, making my way up north at a gentle pace over a week or so and into Laos. A couple of weeks there, then down into Cambodia at the beginning of July to meet Aya. A plane from Phnom Penh to Kuala Lumpur to Kota Kinabalu in Borneo around about the 12th July when Hannah will be getting in.
I’ve booked a bunk in a hostel. Looks exceptional for a £5 bed. The website says this:
At lub d, “cleanliness” is not an option. It is the basic package of everything we do or offer. If ones ask for a not-so-cleanly room with some discount, oh !, we just don’t have that. Besides, our shared bathrooms are large, air conditioned, and so clean. you will love them
Not a lot to say at this stage- just wanted to get the engines revving. Farewell and hello!
I was once hired to promote a ‘leading men’s deodorant brand’ which out of respect for my employer I won’t identify here, though for the sake of my blog’s integrity I will say that it makes you smell like a teenage boy, and it rhymes with ‘stinks’.
The gist of it was I got paid £90 to distribute promotional packs of the latest range called ‘Dry Focus’ on and around my university campus. The promotional packs consisted of florescent light bulb-like tubes containing a rolled up poster of the page 3 model Keeley Hazell and a small sample canister. The poster had a seductive caption: “Guys, keep your eyes on the prize, the mating game is all about your wits not your pits. Stay dry, stay focussed. Keeley x.” About 400 of these arrived in a hefty box at my door and though I spent two afternoons earnestly harassing indifferent undergraduates, there were about 100 cans left over which are currently maturing peacefully under my bed, clocking up vintage.
It was generally a humiliating task. I had to always be on the move in fear that one of these students will open their present immediately and be offended by the poster and tell me just how little respect I have for myself. On a couple of occasions I also had to be accompanied in the shadows by a friend who had to take photographic evidence of my work. If I was really doing my job properly I would have also gone into lectures and announced to a crowd of 100 4th-year linguists that Dry Focus gives lads ‘pulling power’.
Lectures are a great place to target a large number of people in one area. You will need to target 2 lectures per week – distribute the cans as students enter and leave the lecture theatre. Brownie points for anyone who is able to get Lynx a mention at the start or end of the lecture. Why not tell them to come and see you if they want a free can and to try the latest pulling aid from Lynx.
And you’ll see there’s all sorts of extra homework to do on social networking sites which I dutifully complied with in my occupation-less tedium, to the general wrath of my facebook community. As I went online and searched for Lynx (oops I said it), I’d see that my colleagues from across the country had already been there. Bogus five-star reviews on Amazon (which, to their credit, they’ve since taken down). Bogus fan clubs with bogus messages from friends who loved the sampler. Bogus threads on YouTube ad pages for the product. Lynx was everywhere, and where it wasn’t, I made my mark- it was like Fight Club.
The job was advertised on SAGE, the university jobs listings service. I was eventually paid about two months after the end of the project, once their accounts department had worked out how to peel a banana. Dubit, the marketing agency who were responsible for this, also recruit children for viral campaigns, as evidenced by an ad I once saw on their recruitment hive Dubit Insider. Dubit children roam the Earth precociously turning other children into Dubit children. At a certain age they spontaneously wither one day, taking with them, to purgatory, anyone within a radius of five or six metres. And that might be how the world ends.
(Update, November 1, 2009: A guy in India has sued Lynx (or, ‘Axe’, as the brand is called out there) on the grounds that in seven years of using the company’s products he has not attracted a single girl. Vaibhav Bedi, 26, said: “The company cheated me because in its advertisements, it says women will be attracted to you if you use [Lynx]. I used it for seven years but no girl came to me.” Full story.)
Six months into my new cosy-comfortable Oxford life, time came to switch flats once again. Flatmate who furnished the flat was sadly and predictably transferred to London to mix numbers in Mayfair; I’d have loved to stick it out in my peaceful Waterways pad, get onto Gumtree and elect his successor, but I didn’t have the means to kit the property out by myself so, brushing the dust off my picaresque hat, I headed out once more to the perilous seas of guerilla room-hunting.
Returning humbly to Gumtree, things were looking bad. At a glance, one in three offers could have been scams. The Oxford houseshare section was overridden with dodgy ads: short, impersonal single-paragraph affairs teeming with clichés and lazy grammar. With one week to complete my quest, I entered the fray with a sinking feeling.
Scammers had upped their game. They now had mobile phones and offered customer support. When I placed an urgent ROOM WANTED ad up on Gumtree I soon got a brief courtesy call from a landlord who said he’d seen my ad and that he was about to email me; if I had any questions please don’t hesitate to get back in touch. In the email he revealed his name as James Moreton. He was offering a beautifully decked out flat in a very desirable area of Oxford to share with two air-hostesses. The address was Moreton Road.
His email (from jjmoreton1@yahoo.com):
I recently found your advert .I have a double room in a 3 bedroom house for
rent and its available in North Oxford. If you are interested , please get
back to us asap for pictures, price and location.
thanks
James
I said tell me more. The next day, all in good time, I got his next email:
Hi,
I called you yesterday.We are a lovely, freindly, hardworking family which when you ll get to know us you will be glad to meet.I got married 14years ago and have 2 lovely children, ( Jamie 18, Angella 11) .We moved to Aberdeen cos of our newly bought property and Job which we want to take care of and we intend to settle down here fully.. Our property was purchased a couple of years ago and we have worked hard to maintain it and thats why we would like to keep it that way and rent it out to a capable Tenant.
The house is actually a beautifully styled and spacious 3 bedroom (2 x double bedroom) and boasting gorgeous floor throughout, sky tv with a 24hour broadband internet ready if you have a computer, the house is furnished, Its got a very Magnificent interior Deco like Flat screen TV, fully fitted kitchen, sleek and stylish fixtures and fittings throughout, newly renovated and mordern bathrooms, a combi boiler gas Central heating and back garden.The other rooms are being occupied by good tenants who works with BAA as an airhost but currently out of town.Obviously,its a very quiet flat. I can make the place unfurnished since you are coming in with your furnitures.
It is situated at Moreton Road, OXFORD, OX2 7AX. The monthly rent is £450 plus a £250 security deposit. The £250 security deposit is refundable at the end of your stay if nothing is damaged in the house, you’ll have your own privacy without anyone interfering in what you do. The rent is with all taxes and utilities bills included in the rent. A lot of good tenants have been let down because of the high charges from agencies and so I have decided to find a tenant myself.
I have attached some photographs of the room and the house for your clean view. I hope you would get back to us as soon as you can so that we can reach a conclusion.Also I would like to know a little bit more about you, your family, what you do. We just want to know a little bit more of whom we might be renting our property to.
Best Regards
James
07769916953
Poor punctuation etc etc (and the image he projects of his happy family jars somewhat with the fact his first child’s birth pre-dates his marriage by four years), but skim-reading the email in my urgency to find a place, I didn’t pay too much attention to its flaws. It sounded like a lovely set-up and, having heard his voice on the phone, the fact that this could be a scam elegantly flew over my head. I spent 40 minutes carefully composing a friendly but mature autobiography to majestically trumpet the fact that tenants don’t come as respectful and responsible as me. He had sent me some images of the interior, and funnily enough I even said in my email to him that “I’d almost be inclined to say it’s worth more than what you’ve asked for.” As the ubiquitous Gumtree forum slogan goes, if it’s too good to be true, then it is. Ah, what a sucker.
So then came the long, template-like, tell-tale email about how time-wasters have got the better of him in the past by not honouring promises, with full instructions on how I should prove I have the funds through an arrangement involving a MoneyGram transfer to a trusted friend or relative. It was an exceedingly wordy email detailing all the terms and conditions of the lease- most of it isn’t worth reproducing but I’ll share the MoneyGram part, the crux of the scam, as a resource for future potential scamees:
Regarding proving to me that you can afford the property.
Am sorry if this might inconvinence you,but am abiding by the policy.I have dealt with alot of people who eventually wasted my time. Before I can come down to meet you at my property.
I will want to see proof ,that you can afford a both the rent £450 and deposit £250…..TO CONVINCE ME BELOW IS THE DETAILS :
1) Visit the nearest Post office around your place and make a transfer of the actual rent and deposits to anyone close to you like your partner, mother or friend.
2)You will use this to fill the Money Gram Transfer form i.e (Senders name = Partner) to Yourself (Receiver=Your name).not ME
3) Scan & Send a copy of the receipt as an Evidence or if you are not comfortable with that you can email me with the details so I can confirm its Validity.
Once I see this receipt, I will be convinced that you can afford our property then we can arrange a proper veiwing of the house. if you are interested in it,then we definitely sign the rental agreement/contract form..If you dont like the property,I will pay you back the Money Gram charges immediately before leaving the property but if you like the it then I will deduct the charges your first month rent so you are not losing anything.
This is an EVIDENCE that you can afford the property.So Note that you are NOT to send me any money untill you view and ready to rent the place.If this is okay by you then I will be looking forward to your response soon.
I was gutted. This guy didn’t even bother reading my A* email. So there I was, dynamically thrown back to square one with this long, unspecific, wall-like email. What a waste of time, what a gullible idiot. And then it hit me that his name and the property’s street were (carelessly?) identical. And then it hit me that he had a thick foreign accent that really didn’t suit the name James Moreton. What an airhead.
But having come this far, and wasted as much time as I had, I thought I should document this low-level scam in the making for posterity. So I recorded a series of our conversations. The first is about Rule Number One of gumtree flat-hunting: if there’s any mention of Western Union or MoneyGram, it’s 100% a scam. There is absolutely no logical basis for an honest landlord to ask a prospective tenant to prove their financial stability through wire transfer.
MoneyGram transfer:
2.57: “This is how me and my wife have agreed to do it so that people don’t waste our time” – scammers wield the notion of ‘timewasters’ like a sword.
3.28: “You showed most interest” – be wary of exclusive offers, especially along the lines of “we think you’ll treat the property with the most respect”.
3.58: A busy man!
The deed:
2.19: I wish I’d tried “James, I don’t want to waste your time but would three weeks be impossible?”
3.11: Close shave!
6.21: Why so insistently inquisitive? Is this information useful to him?
So three hours later I received an email with a pdf attachment that he claimed to be his scanned deed. It looked impressively detailed and he’d put in some nice touches with masking tape. For a photoshop job this was pretty good, but where did the template come from? I google searched for images of deeds but it didn’t throw up anything similar, let alone matches. So I called up Yorkshire Building Society who’s indicated as the mortgage lender for more info. Apparently all the numbers and codes in the document match up to the kind they use, but the lady pointed out that a deed would necessary have a signature on it somewhere- which this doesn’t. And the headers indicate that this is a three-page document, so I presume there isn’t one. The registration time stated on the document is a baffling oddity as well- eleven o’clock in the evening, surely Yorkshire Building Society don’t register new properties around the clock? No, says the lady on the phone, they definitely don’t.
Some of the wording in the second half of the document makes me wonder whether this is based on the deeds to an allotment of some description. Can anyone with experience in property-buying shed any more light on this? It astounds me that he’s so confidently and comprehensively persistent whilst frequently coming up with childish idiosyncrasies like the Moreton-Moreton connection and now this ridiculous time-stamp.
End game:
1.21: “You can just send me a text” – lol.
2.01: Of course, what I did wouldn’t have proved I had the funds. It would prove that my bank account was now that much poorer.
3.40: I wanted to quiz him about the local supermarkets- another cautious interruption from JJ Moreton.
4.40: “Timewaster” the age-old poison dart of wire transfer scammers.
6.00: “Beech Road and then I’ve Moreton Road…” Moreton Road is the address of the bogus property he had advertised. There’s a small cul-de-sac signed Beech Road in Headington, East Oxford, but he means Beech Croft Road, which is a narrow road parallel to Moreton Road, by no means central or memorable.
This has turned into a quite a large entry but hopefully it will serve as a useful reference to anyone who ever has any suspicion that they’ve been contacted by a scammer. I should also add that, out of diligence I contacted the Thames Valley (Oxford) police about all the above for what it was worth, but absolutely nothing has come of it- what can they do?
Moving to Oxford, I found advertised on Gumtree a single-bedroom flat right in the centre of town at a very affordable price, it was too good to be true! When I showed interest the following was the email I got in response:
Hello ,
Thanks for the email and also Yes,I Mr.Rev Goodman Cannon owned the home and also it is situated at (St John Street) and also want you to know that it was due to my transfer that makes me and my family to leave the our home and also want to give it out for rent and looking for a resposible person that can take very good care of it as we are not after the money for the rent but want it to be clean at the time and the person that will rent it to take it as if it were its own.So for now we are situated in Miami FL,we are here in our new home with my wife and daughter and also with the keys of the apt which you are interested in renting,we try to look for an agent that we can give the document of the home and keys before we left but could not see and we as well dont want our place to be used any how in our absence that is why we took it along with us.So at present now i am in west africa for a mission of God crusade which i believe is a great work and my wife and daughter are in Miami FL in our current home.So i hope you will promise us to take very good care of our apt.So get back to me on how you could take care of our place or perhaps experience you have in renting home.Hope you are okay with the price of 115 Pounds per week with hydro,heat laundry facilities,air condition and so on.I look forward to hearing from you ASAP so that i can forward you an application to fill out and discuss on how to get the place for rent,also are you ready to rent it now or when?.and how long do you want to stay in the apt? Await your reply,below is the address.
St John Street, Oxford, OX1
Thanks and Regards.
Rev.Goodman Cannon
As Gumtree moderators seem to love saying to distraught victims and worried flat-hunters, if it’s too good to be true then it’s too good to be true. The sketchy grammar and adventurous spelling reminded me of my penpal from Edinburgh- this had to be a scam. And besides, the email was in comic sans, and I wasn’t ten years old.
So I laughed it off and didn’t bother replying. I figured gumtree scammers were just another one of life’s inconveniences you just have to put up with like rain and fish bones, and continued steadfastly with my search.
But looking back at it, there are some hilariously kitsch moments in his spiel. For a start he’s painted himself as a ‘holy man’ and tried to reassure me not only with this venerable title but also with a most dignified if bloody peculiar first name. Where the hell did he then get Cannon’ from?! Then he talks about Miami later on as if I’m chasing the American Dream, and simultaneously tells me he’s a missionary in Africa, spreading the light of Western Civilisation… What an ambitious salesman! Imagine if his grammar was a little better, say it was at the standard you’d expect from a wealthy priest as described, then I might have stayed on the hook. Surely with 250,000 people working in this growth industry, they’d have polished up their rudimentary language skills by now?! It’s sweetly inept in a way.
When I finally found my way through the jungle of deception and poor English and found a real flat to move into, I fondly recounted the above to my flatmate over our first drink together.
Hello ,
Thanks for the email and also Yes,I Mr.Rev Goodman Cannon owned the home and also it is situated at (St John Street) and also want you to know that it was due to my transfer that makes me and my family to leave the our home and also want to give it out for rent and looking for a resposible person that can take very good care of it as we are not after the money for the rent but want it to be clean at the time and the person that will rent it to take it as if it were its own.So for now we are situated in Miami FL,we are here in our new home with my wife and daughter and also with the keys of the apt which you are interested in renting,we try to look for an agent that we can give the document of the home and keys before we left but could not see and we as well dont want our place to be used any how in our absence that is why we took it along with us.So at present now i am in west africa for a mission of God crusade which i believe is a great work and my wife and daughter are in Miami FL in our current home.So i hope you will promise us to take very good care of our apt.So get back to me on how you could take care of our place or perhaps experience you have in renting home.Hope you are okay with the price of 115 Pounds per week with hydro,heat laundry facilities,air condition and so on.I look forward to hearing from you ASAP so that i can forward you an application to fill out and discuss on how to get the place for rent,also are you ready to rent it now or when?.and how long do you want to stay in the apt? Await your reply,below is the address.
I started using Gumtree to find flats and flatmates two or three years ago and have successfully found a total of three flats and five flatmates, all of which have worked out superbly for me. The first scammish episode I had was in Edinburgh when I needed to sublet a room in my Tollcross flat for a couple of months over the summer. I got this email from a certain Timi White writing from timi_luvreal@yahoo.com:
Hello, Am Timi by name and am a model,i will be having shooting in your country and i need an apartment to stay till end of the show, if you dont mind i will like to know more about you and your apartment tell me the price for week or per month,the conditions and also do send me the pictures of the apartment if available, I will await for your response as soon as possible. Bye
I sent back a short response repeating the basic details I’d quoted in my Gumtree ad, which also already came with photos of the flat. The next email from Timi:
Hi, Thanks for your quick response.I am very Glad to hear from you.I want to let you know that the I am okay with all the arrangement but I will not be able to come and view the room first so I will be glad if you can send me some pics of the room.In fact I love the location of the flat.Like I said, it is My Daughter that is making use of the room. Regarding the Payment,I want you to know that I will be making the payment for a 5 Months which is £1,625.I will instruct My Client to issue to you a cheque of £4,000 in which you will deduct the cost of the rent plus additional £50 for running around and then send the remaining funds to my Daughter traveling agent who will handle My Daughter flight and every other thing.I want you to kindly consider the room rented to My Daughter cos She is surely moving in. She will be staying for a period of 3 months so subsequent rents will be paid monthly or weekly depending on how you want it.In view of this,I want you to kindly get back to me asap with your full name, contact address and phone number both home and mobile so that I can instruct my associate to issue the cheque to you.I wait to read from you soonest and do have a nice day.
About my daughter.. My name is Florence by name ,23 years, 5″8′ tall, straight,Female and single.She don’t drink or smoke,Her hobbies are reading,swimming for fun and sometimes play tennis. Kind regards.
Awful grammar, wild use of capital letters, a weird sense of urgency. And it wasn’t very consistent with the first email. Suddenly he’s his own daughter, and switches recklessly between ‘I’ and ‘she’. This individual is in a hurry, I thought, and later came to the theory that this was a Russian gangster on the run. In my next email I asked my mysterious friend for clarification. Why will they be paying 5 months of rent for a 3-month stay? Why have I been told she’s straight and single. What is she doing in Edinburgh? And what do you know, in the next email I get she’s looking to get married:
Sorry about the mistake,her name is florence and about all the rules we are okay with it and she is coming for shooting and after that she will be staying for there ,because she wants to get married in europe,i will be waiting to have your full name and address..
I replied saying I was hesitant to go ahead with this, that he wasn’t being clear enough. I asked him what company she’s doing her modelling with, whether she could speak English and could get in touch directly, and what the hell marriage has to do with any of this. And then:
Hello, She do speak english and dont worry about her
A bit rude! I replied quite succinctly that I will worry about someone who is supposedly wanting to move into my flat. But even then the guy persisted:
Thanks for the email and i will like to have the name and address to be on the cheque…
What the hell is wrong with this guy?! What’s he playing at?! For a couple of days it was just one of those curious incidents you laugh about over lunch, but I became genuinely concerned that I’d given too much away about myself to a nutter so I went on google.
The guy wanted to scam me. He was most probably from Nigeria, judging from the script, and part of an immense battalion of swindlers involved in what’s now commonly referred to as ’419 fraud’. The number corresponds to the article defining fraud in the Nigerian Criminal Code, and as many as 250,000 countrymen are thought to be involved in it. In the US alone, somewhere between $100m-200m are lost to 419 scammers every year. Returning to Gumtree, I discover that their forums are chock-a-block with woeful victims, many of whom report to have let their guard down in their desperation of finding somewhere to live.
If I’d given Timi White my address, I would shortly have received a cheque in the post for £4000. The instruction was to keep three-months worth of rent and a bit of pocket money for my troubles and send the remaining money on to his daughter via wire transfer. My bank has to credit me within 5 days whether or not they’ve finished clearing the cheque and so when in, say, 10 days time when they’ve finally come to the conclusion that the cheque was fake, they will then deduct the money again. If in that time I’d transferred any money out of my account as instructed, then I’d stand to lose that amount of money. The bank doesn’t usually refund the victim in this kind of scenario (as it’s me who trusted the cheque and willingly brought it to the bank), and there’s not a lot police can do to follow up as wire transfers don’t require identification from the receiver.
Sometime in my school days, a school friend who liked drums, penis jokes and philosophy told me about the notion of noumenon in a pub conversation. Imagine a music festival, he said. Imagine a big, rowdy crowd unanimously silenced by something unspeakably impressive happening on stage. That unspeakable something is a noumenon, and this is the thought I was mulling over in my head, five years overdue, as I stood facing something unspeakably impressive in a big, rowdy crowd at yesterday’s Field Day Festival in London.
Concerts attract specific fans, music festivals attract generic music lovers. Each festival-goer is a part-time specific fan who has some kind of agenda for the day. They each have their hot picks but have to share them with an uncontrollable mass of generic music lovers who have a sensory void to fill while waiting for their respective hot picks to appear on stage. And to the sad detriment of the specific fans, sensory voids, like empty vessels, make a lot of noise.
And so, under the cruel governance of these laws, I found myself immersed in an unspeakably impressive spectacle and a rowdy crowd of cretins. As I let my mind innocently wander, as it treated itself to the image of the cretinous crowd mysteriously dumbstruck by a noumenon, one of the cretins addressed me.
“Junta!” it spoke. “Hey man, how’s it been?!” Overcome by joy, it man-hugged me and offered up that manly vertical handshake to boot. He was now fully facing the wrong way, back to gig, eyes brightly scanning our tenuously linked past. “So where you at? You working?” With spectacular politeness I told it that I was living in Oxford, that it’s peaceful, that I cycle along a canal path to get to work every day, that my job is a nitty-gritty businessy job, that I wouldn’t want to bother him with the details. Then, as a noumenon exploded into magnificent cascades of sound and light on stage, he began bothering me with his details. He’d been travelling. How long for? Six months. Job? Not yet sure what he wants to do. Wants to stay active though, wants to maintain focus in his life. So he’s going to cycle the length of Britain in 10 days for charity. Land’s End to John O’Groats. He’s confident he’ll pull it off. In fact he’ll be disappointed in himself if he doesn’t.
I tactically pretended to drop something on the ground. As I bode my time shifting crushed beer cans with my feet, I remembered seeing something about it on facebook. Specifically, he’d done what any self-respecting bane of my life would do, and created both a facebook event and a facebook group for his bike excursion, and invited me, a tangential friend at best, to join both. Needless to say, I didn’t respond to either invitation, and resurfacing from my ten-second hunt for nothing I wondered whether my facebook nonchalence brought an element of social faux pas into this serendipitous encounter. I hope he doesn’t mention it.
And that was when these words magically came out of my mouth: “I think I saw something about it on facebook.” Nobody could have more prodigiously re-attracted his attention. “I’m so crap at responding to these group invitations,” I said. “I get so many, it gets confusing,” I said. “So it’s good to be able to hear about it face to face,” I said, and completed my metamorphosis into a class-A cretin. A few muffled sentences about his fitness or something later he was finally ready to move on, to see what else was going on in the festival. I bade him a cordial farewell as he re-merged with the monstrous mass of generic music lovers behind me. He left me with a cool high-five, a final fuck you to my noumenon.
