I previously mentioned the ‘heavy breather’ who used to ring our London phone number. He wasn’t doing what the many, many callers are doing nowadays, of course – he wasn’t trying to scam me into sending him money or giving him my bank details. I’m not sure what he got out of talking to me, if anything, as I neither got upset nor played along.

Barely a day goes by without at least one phone call from someone trying to make me take out insurance on my boiler, replace the insulation in my loft or ‘help’ me get rid of the virus on my computer. It’s usually easy to recognise foreign call centres, with the gap between my ‘hello’ filled with chatter in the background then a foreign-sounding voice asking for me by name (often very strangely pronounced!). I usually put on a very sad voice and tell them, “She died of the covid a week ago.” Many say sorry and hang up, most ask if I am the householder. I say no and put down the receiver by that point.

Some years ago I started answering the phone with, “Good morning. Such and such police station. How may I help you?” which was great in getting them to back away quickly. But, once, I answered in that way and the voice on the other end said, ‘Oh, sorry,” and hung up and within a few minutes I got an email from my brother-in-law in America who had been ringing to say he and my sister were coming to visit! Thank goodness for emails!

Another, quite useful way to answer (if you’re sure that it is a scam call) is to become very melodramatic and say something like, “Is it you? What have you done? There’s blood, everywhere? Oh, my God, what am I going to do?” etc. But this one takes some planning and is really exhausting to keep up for long.

Scammers and phishers and crooks don’t just phone, of course. Nowadays there are so many seemingly clever attempts at cheating one out of money on-line. It would be a miracle if my Junk folder hasn’t 5 or 10 offers of prizes from shops that I have never been to in any one day or if my In-box doesn’t have one or two emails, purporting to be from my bank or Amazon or the tax people warning me that if I don’t click on the link something terrible is going to happen. So far, I’ve not been tempted to click on the links but I can understand how it happens.

But, the most amazing and weird scamming emails I’ve recently received are the ones I am most unlikely to be taken in by. They start out with a variation of:

Approximately 3 or 4 months ago I was unfortunately for you, able to hack into your emails and from there was able to see everything that you have posted and every site you have looked at. You have very naughtily been looking at very rude adult sites.

If you don’t send me 2000£ in bitcoin to my email address in the next week I will publish to all your contacts the following photos of you pleasuring yourself – yes, I have also taken over your camera and all your contacts.

Then, they attach some pixilated photos – of an unidentifiable man pleasuring himself!

Why do these creeps think I am a man?

If I didn’t think it was so funny, I would be very upset!

Here I am, a little, old, white haired woman who, except for my youngish attitude to tech, might be scared or outraged or – if I were a man, worried about what else the scammer had seen!