Today's scams are mainly about phishing and cyber-attacks committed in the virtual world. I am just reading on the Police.hu portal that a woman called the man from Szigethalm on behalf of a Hungarian financial institution on January 12, 2023. According to his story, his current account was attacked by a phisher, there was a shower of questions, and then he was informed that, in order to prevent unauthorized persons from obtaining the HUF in the account, the money must be transferred to a technical account for security reasons. The man wanted to keep his money safe, so he transferred HUF 8 million to a "technical account". Instead of the victim, the Szigetszentmiklós police went after the money, they identified and arrested a 45-year-old man in five days, and the millions were recovered.
As we know, there have always been and always will be gullible people, but the idea, the wit, the good manners that used to be characteristic of fraudsters have disappeared from today's scams. For example, according to anecdotes, at the beginning of the last century, there lived a stylish, recklessly witty con artist named János Hamrák, whose - according to the accounts - one of his most notorious scams was when he picked up the wooden cube paving of Rottenbiller Street and sold it to Székesfehérvár.
Hamrák also devised the pumping of the merchants on Váci Street. According to the story, in front of the Handl hat store in the middle of Váci Street, he started measuring with two people as an engineer. Of course, the owner became curious about what they were staring at in front of his shop. He turned to Hamrá, who he believed to be an engineer, who told him that they had come from the capital because a public toilet had to be installed in Váci Street. Of course, which merchant would be happy to have a toilet in front of his shop, so the owner invited "Engineer Hamrák", who shortly after came out onto the street with an envelope filled with money in his pocket. Of course, they stopped one house away and the scene repeated until they reached the end of the street.
János Hamrák. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Of course, there were - albeit small-scale - ingenious tricks in socialism as well. Many people scribbled and pilfered small and large things, saying they would take them over for socialist preservation. However, there were also thoughtful tradesmen among them, especially among the suppliers. For example, the brewery truck loaders noticed that the Skoda trailers were slightly longer than the Zil trailers. According to the regulations, five of the compartments had to be placed lengthwise and four across. Yes, but they realized that if the rectangular compartments are placed on the Skoda trailers in the bottom row, not lengthwise, but crosswise, four more compartments can fit on the trailer. Due to the platform lifter, the bottom row is not visible during the exit calculation anyway, so the profit was an extra four cases of beer per transport. However, the crash was caused by the lack of space, as the four compartments were not enough to turn around, but bottles were also pushed into the gaps in the driver's cab. On one occasion, at the exit, the car in front suddenly stopped, and the one behind it rammed, which was enough to break the blocked windows. The beer began to flow and this brought the downfall, so the four compartments of beer were finished as extras.
It also took some thinking and ingenuity so that the goods were less, but the weight was always the same. This happened while transporting raspberries. When the truck left Szob, it was loaded with the same weight as when it arrived at the hall in the capital, but the raspberries were less. They had been puzzled for a week when they decided - according to the jargon of the time - to put internal affairs loaders on the trucks. Days passed, but the weight was still there, and the raspberries were less, until one day when the loader was about to get out at the weigh-in, the driver shouted at him, don't move, because the weight will go away. Well, this was the point of failure, because they found out that the driver of the car in Szob always got out during the weigh-in to check the weight. He knew that he was, say, 80 kilos, which is the weight of a raspberry in compartment X. On the way, he stopped, saying that he was doing his work at the ditch, went to the back of the car, put down the compartments corresponding to his weight in the ditch, for which they were already waiting a little further away, then sat back down and headed for the hall, where he did not get out during the weigh-in.
Well, after hearing such cases, they said that such people should be locked in a room and solved seemingly intractable criminal or crime prevention tasks with them. Translated to today, I would shut down some inventive phishers in such a way as to provide a solution for the prevention of cybercrime and phishing, as well as for the screening and punishment of fraudulent webshops.
