The internet is awash with scams. Every batch of emails brings new spam, phishing scams, etc. I don’t very often read them these days because my external spam filters exclude most of them and my internal spam filters catch most of the rest.

Scam 1:

I only noticed one purporting to come from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the British equivalent of the US’s Internal Revenue Service, because (although it went straight into my spam folder) it happened to flash up on the screen - my spam filter uses Growl notification. It was a typically unsophisticated effort, although I won’t go into all the give-aways as I don’t want to help them improve their scam! The text of the message said: ‘You have 1 new ALERT message. Please login to your Online Account and go to Messages section in order to read the message. To Login, please click the link below: Online Account Login’. I was pretty sure it was a scam but an examination of the link showed that it took you to http://bordnet.net/www.hmrc.gov.uk/index.html. I have reported this to HMRC and the ISP which hosts the dodgy site.

Scam 2:

This one wasn’t picked up by my spam filters, but it will be next time! It purported to be from Drago Store Pty in Australia. Again, I won’t discuss the many clues which indicated that it was fraudulent, although I will say that I treat all emails from gmail addresses as suspect. As far as I can see, Google don’t have any proper abuse-reporting procedure. Gmail is certainly every fraudster’s favourite email service. The message read: ‘Greetings from Drago Store Pty. My name is Douglas Patti the CEO of the company. i will like to place order on some products in your company,but i would like to know if you ship to Australia and also do you accept Visa or Master card as method of payment? Please do not forget to include your web page in your replying back to my message and get back to me as fast as possible so that i can let you know the product i would like to order. Please email me back with the current price list on the products if you website is not updated. Thank you.... Yours Sincerely, Douglas Patti.’

I googled one or two items in the message and immediately found this site reporting a scam related to a similar email.

Before Christmas, I sent out quite a few books to Bertram Books. I was slightly concerned that they might be caught up with the demise of Woolworth, but I wasn’t going to refuse to supply them. My trust was rewarded and they paid me promptly as they always have before and since. In fact, they and the other big UK book wholesaler, Gardner’s, are a pleasure to deal with. On the other hand, I supplied a bookshop in one of London’s swankiest neighbourhoods with books on 2 and 9 December and they still have not sent me a cheque. Grrr! I wonder if I should name and shame them.

By contrast, again, I invoiced Heffer’s, the famous Cambridge bookshop, for some books on 6 March and they’ve already sent me a cheque. Well done!

I have underestimated Sir Fred Goodwin again. His pension is now apparently £703,000 per annum. Moreover, it appears that about half the amount was discretionary. So why did they pay it? The decision was apparently made in the early hours of the morning and the Government were not informed. The Chairman and the Remuneration Committee certainly have some explaining to do, and it would seem quite in order for the British Government, as the largest shareholder, to sue them. It won’t get the money back but it may serve to encourager les autres.

However, compared with the vast sums which the Government itself has squandered, and continues to squander, Sir Fred’s pension is unimportant. Having devised a scheme, the Public Finance Initiative, to rob the taxpayer blind while cooking the Government’s books, the Government is now going to bail out the very companies which made so much money from the scheme in the first place.

If it is right that Sir Fred should be hounded into returning at least some of his pension, it is surely even more appropriate that senior ministers and mandarins be expected to forego at least half their pensions.

In truth, I’m the last person to be giving financial advice. Tiger of the Stripe has never made me enough money to live on. Nonetheless, my income has increased substantially in the last twelve months. This is partly due to hard work and partly due to the pound’s declining exchange rate against the dollar. A year ago, every dollar I earned was worth about £0.50 to me. Now it is worth about £0.70 - that’s a 40% increase!

I’m not by nature mean, but my low income has forced me to be quite frugal. Most of my spending has been on council tax, utility bills and food. I can’t do much about council tax except vote against the incumbent Liberal Democrats whose arrogance, ineptitude and profligacy have been quite astounding. I can do little about the utility bills, except to use energy more efficiently.

That leaves food. I hear that sales of baked beans have soared in recent months. This is understandable, because they are quick, cheap and nutritious. However, it is even cheaper to make your own meals from scratch, and it is more rewarding too. I made a red lentil soup on Saturday and it was so delicious that I can’t wait to make it again. An onion, a carrot and a large handful of lentils (plus some water, of course) is all you need to feed two people at, say £0.15 ($0.23) per head, plus the cost of gas or electricity. I add some chilli powder and ground coriander seeds at negligible extra cost. They make it a very warming, cheerful soup for a winter’s day. A piece of home-made bread completes the meal. It’s absolutely delicious, and there are so many possible variations - you could use yellow split peas or Puy lentils (although both need longer to cook); you could drop the onion and/or the carrot and add, cabbage, tomatoes, potatoes, or just about anything else.

For one awful moment I thought that the natural order of things, that is to say market forces, had become distorted. However, it turns out that Sir Fred Goodwin (I keep almost saying Ron Goodwin - he wrote 633 Squadron) is receiving a pension of £693,000 p.a. That’s alright, then.

Talking of market forces, one of the main arguments for the obscene salaries, bonuses and pensions received by many in the higher echelons of British industry is that they are needed to attract and retain the ‘best people’. This is fallacious on several grounds.

First, we clearly have NOT attracted the best people. Our banks have been run by a bunch of egotistical idiots, as has most of British industry. Senior management in, say, Germany, are paid less well than in the UK. Can we say, in general, that British industry has been better managed than German industry? Certainly not in the manufacturing sector.

Secondly, the idea that everything should be left to market forces (that ancient Thatcherite mantra) is absurd. We do not leave the consumption of heroin to market forces. If our government really believed in market forces, it would, for instance, permit secondary picketing. I am not suggesting that either heroin or picketing should be deregulated, simply that one cannot rely entirely upon market forces. Even if we accepted the idea that a theoretical perfect market would regulate prices and pay perfectly, we do not have anything like a perfect market in executive pay. The company is theoretically answerable to shareholders for all their policies, including remuneration. However, although we all own these companies (through pension schemes, and now, in the case of the banks, as shareholders), we do not have the chance to vote at AGMs. The votes are largely cast by the pension funds. The people who run the pension funds and the people on remuneration committees are, for the main part, other over-paid executives.

Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, is apparently receiving a pension of £650,000 per annum at the age of 50. The underlying principle is clearly that pensions should be in inverse proportion to the wealth that the pensioner has generated. As my newsagent pointed out, it is probably a price worth paying to keep such a destroyer of wealth out of the job market.

Sadly, this does not bode well for me as I can’t hope to compete with Sir Fred. While Tiger of the Stripe did not make much money last year, it did not lose billions of pounds, or even hundreds. I am clearly an abject failure in the world of high commerce and will be punished accordingly.

You might think that this would leave our revered Prime Minister Gordon Brown in poll position to receive a bumper pension. His policies, such as the tripartite system of regulation, allowed RBS and others to squander billions of pounds. Unfortunately, the PM blotted his copy-book by saving the world on 10 December 2008 (see here). This must surely more than compensate for wrecking the British economy.