Woken up by the postman putting a huge quantity of letters through the letter box. At least fifteen are the same letter x15 from the Inland Revenue. At one level this is extremely efficient - there can be no doubt that I’ve now got the message about paying my National Insurance contributions. At another level…

Log-in to Linux box and discover an email to me…from me. I don’t remember sending that. Check the message header and presume it’s a scam. Decide to see how the law enforcement agencies can help me. Look around the police website but keep going round in circles. Try Directgov and type ‘cybercrime’ into the search box. The top hit is ‘The Mental Capacity Act’, well I suppose there might be something in that. I then find this not very helpful site from the Home Office . Eventually after much head scratching and searching, I get to this site from The National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (it’s kinda quaint isn’t - ‘hi-tech’ crime unit - does anyone else still use that term?). I look around that and ..it takes me back to the Home Office. Eventually I do find a form to fill on the NHTCU. I’m not convinced it’s a secure transmission so I keep the facts to a minimum. Later I get what looks to be a spam email as the sender appears in my inbox as ‘noreply’ - it’s from NHTCU with a minimalist line - ‘Thank you for your contact’, er, that’s it.

Marks out of ten for the four websites in question in coming even close to answering my question: 0 out of 10.

Later we go out for an Indian meal and I’m bombared with questions by my eldest son about the internet, spammers, encryption and so on. Get back and think I’ll have another look at all of this, but this time I use Google groups. Within minutes I have the answer. I’ve fallen prey to a well known US spammer, this is a recent attack (there are plenty of others who have suffered the same in the past few days), but he seems to be quite notorious for this type of activity. According to the newsgroups, if they’re true (my paranoia runs away… perhaps the newsgroup posts are part of the scam?), someone has already contacted law people in the states and action might be taken sooner rather than later.

It raise a big question about social information, the guardians and publishers of that, the creators of it, and the retrieval process. Despite the presumably large sums of money which the four sites above have (or at least the organisations which promote them have), I could find no information of any help at all to my basic query. The newsgroups are stitched together by people in their own time adding their own bits of knowledge and are organised in a way that seems to facilitate free text and phrase searching.