New blog post: About ghouls, rapscallions and varmints
With apologies to ‘the vanishing pumpkin’ and kids’ book author Tony Johnston. The Friday blog on a cell phone short code platform looking for investors has attracted a fair amount of attention. It appears to be an alleged pyramid scheme built around a SMS short code platform. And then last night, while I was reading a book to my youngest daughter, it dawned on me that the almost all the characters in the book bear some similarity to the characters in the short code platform fairy tale. The story line is straight forward – it’s about a 700-year old woman and the 800-year old man (investors) and their search for a missing pumpkin (the R250k capital investment) on 31 October (Halloween). They meet Gert along the way in various disguises. Firstly, he is the ghoul, then a rapscallion and finally a varmint. The 800-year old man ‘does a trick’ on each of the characters in an attempt to find the missing pumpkin, but to no avail. Finally the group come across a 900-year old wizard (possibly a local regulator, either the FAIS Ombud or the FSB), who has the pumpkin, but it has already been converted into a candle-lit jack ‘o lantern. But where is the capital (the contents of the pumpkin), which the old couple wanted to convert into a pumpkin? Well, the wizard has carved it out and no doubt the curators have taken their share of the spoils for the work that they did, in carving out the innards. Of course the old man and women are more than happy to share in some of the pumpkin, not realising that the entire pumpkin belonged to them in the first place. Back to the original short code platform fairy tale. What is strange is that while I copied the FSB on the email I sent back to the original sender, I have yet to receive an acknowledgment of receipt, let alone any attempt at action. In the mean time our friend Gert aka ghoul, rapscallion or varmint, could be making hay, fleecing gullible investors of any amount of hard-earned capital. What I did get though, is the start of an investigation by the cell phone network operator, who does take these types of issues rather more seriously, and has the staff to do so. What irritated me more though was that someone has sold my details to an unscrupulous buyer. There was no due diligence done by the seller and if there was, what would they have found? But I do wonder whether any of my human rights, and specifically my right to privacy, have been violated, and whether I can sue. But who would I sue, the alleged pyramid scheme operator – who has probably disappeared into the deep jungle, or the seller of my data? Who would probably deny having sold my information, in the first place? Happy Halloween to those couples who don’t believe in fairy tales and to the ghouls, rapscallions and varmints out there, why not apply your minds to do some good and build wealth in your community and not attempt to destroy people’s lives.
