So, you’ve had a nice long holiday, and what do come home to – a few bills, but at least 15 pieces of junk mail. It’s only paper, but why is it so annoying? For me it’s quite plain and simple, it’s a waste of a perfectly good tree…
But, my other gripe with the stuff is that it doesn’t stop coming through the hole in my door. I mean, like you, I know where the fast food outlets are, and if I want a ‘heart attack in a box’ I’ll go an order one. I don’t need a reminder to tell me when I’m hungry. You know, I might just print up some of my own fliers saying, ‘No take-aways today, I’ve eaten’, and stick ‘em through their letterboxes on a regular basis and see how they like it!
The best place to live and avoid this papyrus plague is the Fair Isles. Lying half-way between the Orkney Isles and Shetland, it’s the remotest part of the UK, and there isn’tone single take-away on the island! I’ll say this for everyone, “Up yours McDonalds!” But do know what, junk mail still makes its way to the 70 or so occupants. A boat delivers supplies and post there once a week. The junk mail goes into the bin, the rubbish is collected and then it goes back on the boat and is dropped off at Shetland to be burnt – and who foots the bill – the tax payer. I guess the burning question is, why would someone send a Freeman’s catalogue there anyway?
In Cornwall they have a slightly bigger problem. If you lived there you could receive up to 20 or 30 pieces of unwanted tat a month. You only have to multiply that amount by the number of residence, and by the end of the year, you’ve got a paper mountain to dispose of. Oh yes you can recycle it of course, but as usual it comes at price to guess who? Last year, Cornwall accumulated 4,000 tons of little bits of annoyance, enough to fill 500 dust carts. “Let’s stick it in a landfill site!” “Certainly sir, that’ll be £700,000 please.” ‘OW MUCH? I swear you could build a mental health unit with that!
As usual, there are two sides to any story, and here are the two teams, the trusty Royal Mail and their revenue and a Netherlands based company situated in an anonymous industrial estate in London called, Spring Global Mail (SGM) and their income. They have a ‘same dog more hair’ policy regarding junk mail, they call it Direct Mail. Basically, the two companies make money for each other, lots of it, but the set up also leaves a loop hole for the scam mail artists to ply their cruel trade.
Now this stuff is nasty. It prays on the vulnerable, the gullible and the mentally ill, but do the two sides feel as if they’re causing a problem? It’s hard to say, as neither company would be interviewed on television. Oh they released a statement slapping each others backs, and mentioned that their services were vital to the economy, but said nothing about the harm that scammers cause.
Even though it has a Royal Mail stamp on the envelope, it doesn’t mean it’s been sent from this country! Some how, foreign criminal gangs are allowed to make their post look ‘local friendly’! They slap a ‘Royal Mail’ stamp on it, aim it towards companies like SGM, in bulk, and they pass it on to our ‘Penny black’ company. Once it’s in the ‘system’, it has to be delivered. As it’s such a trusted brand many people place their trust in it. Well, after all, the Queen does deliver it herself, although quite how she finds the time at her age baffles me!
So this is how it begins. A vulnerable or elderly person replies to one scam letter that claims they have won say £250,000. Now the scammers have an address, this is added to what’s known as a ‘sucker’s list’ and the list is then sold on to other criminal gangs. To win this enormous amount, all you have to do is send £20 to ‘Scammers r us’ – and you’re quids in! No you’re not, the prize never arrives, but what does turn up is another letter from a different gang. And that’s all it takes for some people to become addicted.
In one case a guy’s marriage nearly ended after he spent £5,000 hoping to fund a golden wedding anniversary trip. In similar situation another guy’s mother spent a quarter of a million pounds, over a 10 to 12 year period! But the worst case I’ve heard of was that of an Alzheimer’s patient.
She was convinced she would win a huge prize eventually, and her daughter couldn’t stop her replying to these letters. In total, her mum had parted with £50,000, and the last thing she said to her daughter, before she died was, “Has the postman been?” When it came to selling her mum’s house her daughter found over 30,000 letters scattered around the property.
Royal Mail said that, in conjunction with the police last year, they removed 6 million scam letters which sounds great, until you hear that foreign con artists flooded the UK with 2.4 billion of the little blighters! SGM were less than helpful. They said that it’s very difficult to remove such post, as you can’t tell if it’s a piece of scam mail, even through transparent wrapping! Honestly, have you ever heard such a crock of horseshit!!!
My view – let’s hope that one day all of the naughty fake mail bastards die the death of a million paper cuts or their combined genitalia turns square and festers at the corners real soon…
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