I LIKE to think that friends and colleagues see me as cool and steely, and ready to spring into action when called upon.
So I was flattered when I received an urgent email from a colleague asking me for help.
His SOS was an unusual request. He wanted me to purchase for him Apple gift vouchers worth £300.
A man on a mission, I hurried into Winchester, where I used my credit card to purchase the three £100 vouchers, redeemable for Apple’s electronics or software.
I emailed for further instructions. My colleague had run out of time to come and collect the vouchers, he messaged. So now he needed me to photograph the vouchers and email the photos to him pronto.
I was beginning to feel that I was being rather put upon by this colleague, who I didn’t know well. Why did he need these vouchers? “They’re for incentives,” he emailed back. Now I got it. My colleague regularly attended business meetings and events, and these vouchers were obviously prizes to reward high sales or similar achievement. I got down to photographing the vouchers, which had serial numbers enabling exchange for goods.
Then my wife arrived home and asked what I was doing. “It’s a scam,” she said immediately.
I looked at my email screen anew as I considered my wife’s awful verdict. It took me about four seconds to realise my wife was right as usual. I phoned the police and they referred me to Action Fraud, the UK's national reporting centre for cyber crime.
Good thing you didn’t get as far as photographing the vouchers and emailing the pictures to the fraudsters, Action Fraud told me. That meant the thieves couldn’t see the serial numbers needed to use the vouchers. Action Fraud urged me to contact Apple to cancel the vouchers.
All this happened in about March. Since then I have spent hours emailing and phoning Action Fraud, Apple and my credit car issuer in efforts to get my £300 back. Each of them said refunding me was a job for one of the others. A couple of times I went back to WHSmith, the Winchester High Street shop where I bought the vouchers. They said the same.
I was pretty much resigned to not getting the £300 back when one of the parties got back in touch to ask if I had managed to get a refund. I think that prompted me to phone Apple again. The upshot of an intense hour talking to them was that they wanted to try reactivating the vouchers. Although they had been cancelled, I still possessed them.
With the three vouchers now worth £300 again I went back to WH Smith and was told they still couldn’t refund me because it wasn’t them that had my money. The £300 had been forwarded to the wholesaler that had provided the vouchers. I asked to see the shop’s busy manager and he was like a saint. He spent ages tapping data into the till then he phoned his supplier and talked to them. Ten tense minutes later and I had in my hand a till receipt showing a £300 refund to my credit card account.
Since then I have been telling anyone who will listen that they should do all their Christmas shopping in WH Smith because the manager there is a saint.
What I didn’t mention to the manager or anyone else in WH Smith is that when I bought the vouchers the assistant serving me warned that Apple vouchers were often used in fraud. “Do you know this person who has asked you to buy vouchers worth £300?” the assistant had cautioned me. “Yes,” I said. My mistake was to assume that the email came from my colleague just because it bore my name and his name.
If money is involved, always double-check who an email has come from.
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