Con-artist hurrah

First off I'll apologise for the long winded, boring, meandering and generally absurdly long last post. I looked back at it and realised how long and boring it was. Go me!

In other news, Suzy and I went to see X3 the other day. I've seen both positive and negative reviews of it, and as an x-men fan I can say that I enjoyed it but not to the same level as the first two movies by any stretch of the imagination. These movies, and the game X-Men Legends 2 on the PSP have renewed my interest in X-Men the comics, and I have gone back to the start with the Marvel Essential Range. They are cheaply made and B&W to cut costs, but when you get several years of comics in a single book for about $20 its worth it for me.

As with many things I do, Suzy is unsurprisingly mortified :)

Now, on to our headline story! I was contacted today as part of a scam at work! And what a clever scam too... For those that don't know, by day I am the mild mannered admissions coordinator for a university faculty and one aspect of that is reviewing applicants english qualifications (yeah, I'm a real hit at parties).

So today, I get my second email from someone calling herself "Angie Browne" telling me she is from the Cambridge IELTS centre (the most common and well known english test) and asking to confirm if we use their verification service on a regular basis "to update their records". The warning bells start to ring when I looked at the email address to see that it came from a chinese hotmail account, and generally the english standard of the email was poor. The first email came a few days ago, when she was an "IELTS Administer" and again today when the story was that their database crashed and she was an "Systems Administrator".

Obviously this is fake, and they are trying to scope out whether it is worth risking a fake english result sheet on the off chance that we don't check them properly. It would be tempting, as the tests need to be booked months in advance so people who want to start study now might consider submitting a counterfeit copy.

So I send her an email back today saying that yes we do use the system (not actually true) and report all irregularities to the relevant authorities. I actually hope she does go ahead and try and put one past me, that would be great to see how good/bad a job they do (based on their actual english level, I'm guessing it would be bad).