A Nice Try

The young woman called on the church office phone: 'I'm following up the phone conversation we had in January. The books you agreed to sponsor as part of our anti-bullying campaign are ready for distribution to the schools of your choice: they have your organisation's details in the front and we just need to sort out where they're going to go and the payment.' I had no memory of any such conversation and said so. I asked whether they had paperwork describing this agreement we had supposedly had come to: they had, the woman said, and a recording of the conversation which she could forward to me. I could just about envisage I might have had some vague discussion on the phone in which an idea was run past me, and some over-enthusiastic person could have run with that idea, but had there been paperwork even I would surely have remembered. I would wait with interest, I said, for copies to be sent on to us.

A moment's Googling revealed that this scam has been going on for at least ten years. The scammers call charities, social organisations and sometimes even businesses (one case concerned a hairdressers' in Bournemouth) in the hope that, like me, they'll assume that someone somewhere in the organisation has agreed to this, or that they have themselves forgotten what they may have said six months before, and they'll cough up. For bigger companies or charities they send a letter and an invoice for a plausible but not huge amount of money, say £200 or less, assuming that a busy accounts department will simply pay it without asking any questions about it: a fraud that relies on the unreliability of human memory, and organisational un-curiosity.