Your bank sends you an e-mail - with logo, address, etc. - to inform you that : "At the time of your last purchase, you received a message informing you of the obligation to adhere to the new regulations concerning the reliability of purchases by credit card on the Internet and the implementation of a stop for your future purchases.
"However, to date we have not received any applications from you and we regret to inform you that you can no longer use your card online.
This is followed by a link to the site where you can "Regularise your situation ... but if you hover over the link, you will see a link, not to your bank, but to ... losramonvanenmoto ! As for the sender, it's a certain zadzadzad who hides behind an (almost) official "Service Conseil".
The only clue - apart from these strange addresses, of course - was an object containing a number of spelling and syntax errors: "Regulations for online shopping.
The whole thing smacks of a scam - in Web parlance, we'd call it a scammingscam = a scam.
What should you do? There is an official website: internet-reporting.gouv.fr very "responsible citizenship ... but a bit long and tedious, especially at the end of the year when spamming and scamming are exploding!
A New Zealand NGO, Netsafehas developed a robot "Re:scam to get back at those nasty scammers: forward the e-mail to me@rescam.org and the bot will start the conversation with your correspondent, just to clutter up his server and waste his time.
The relative success of the system - 6,000 scams received and processed within 24 hours of its launch - underlines the paradigm shift from reporting to the relevant authorities to a mirror response: you attack me, I attack you.
A paradigm shift and, above all, a new type of relationship are being established on the Web, one that could be described as epidermal, with trolling as another example.
Trolling - trolls are mischievous goblins from Scandinavian mythology who come at night to pull the feet of sleepers, and devour babies for the nastiest - is not a recent phenomenon, but it is beginning to develop significantly against brands on social media, where Internet users have fun provoking or attacking brands gratuitously.
Example: this passenger who tweets: "Hello @SNCF, I'm on the train leaving Gare de Lyon for Lyon, and I'm a fare evader. Have a nice day".
Why such behaviour? To amuse his friends? Certainly, but not only that: why pick on some brands and not others? The SNCF, with its endemic delays, will always attract jokers.
In fact, socionauts are under constant pressure from advertisers and brands, in return for "legitimate their free use of search engines and social media, from Google to Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.
Pressure that can sometimes be unbearable - to put it mildly! Being bombarded with ads for lemon squeezers when you've just bought one because the retargeting specialists don't know that you've just bought one is more than a little annoying.
There comes a time when you want to re-establish a certain balance in the relationship between brands, the media and ... yourself; and since it's hard to take revenge - for the time being - on Google or Facebook, it's the brands that pay the price.
I'm not sure that all this helps to create a calm climate, but for the trollers it does provide a safety valve.
