Just received an email  offering me a chance to get a King Charles Coronation coin, FREE, in return for £2-50 post and packing,  Mail is purportedly from the London Royal Mint.

    Must admit I wonder why it's free.

    But at the top of the mailing,  in small print, is the main reason I have doubts.

    Quote: (My Italics.)    If you don't visualize correctly the message, CLICK HERE
If you don't want to receive any more commercial communication,please unsubscribe.

    That message is not written by a native speaker of English.  It smacks of Chinglish, or one of the other versions of Minglish.

    It has all the other spam triggers of creating 'false urgency', 'limited availability', etc.  No way does a legitimate sale/offer need three links for the same thing in one short page of text.

    Much as I'd like to get one of these coins for my Grandaughter I'm not following the links in this mail.

    Gyppo

Yup, pretty sure that's a scam of some kind.  Maybe just marketing - get your e-mail address to bombard you with more profitable offerings.  I wouldn't follow it.  There'll be no shortage of genuine souvenirs for Alma without risking a problem.

Definitely not going there.

I looked at the Royal Mint's own website.  I was already pretty convinced.  The prices they charge for the definitely genuine thing indicate that the freebie is just a con.

As scams go it's not a bad example of the 'small profits,quick returns' approach.

If only a few thousand people send £2-50 it would net a nice little haul before closing the account and vanishing. As well as the list of 'confirmed sucker' addresses to sell on via the darker reaches of the web.

And at that price most of the victims would just 'chalk it up to experience' and not make too much fuss.

Gyppo

I was playing a Name that Tune game yesterday and I knew the song was The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, but could not come up with Gordon Lightfoot's name as the artist. I enjoyed his work.

You probably know, Chick, that the Edmund Fitzgerald was a real ship, a huge freighter which was lost with all hands in a storm on Lake Superior in 1975.  It was an odd disaster for a number of reasons.  She was a big, powerful ship - at one time the biggest on the lake, still the biggest to have sunk there; she was in trouble and taking on water, but the highly experienced captain thought she was holding her own and never issued a distress call; she was within sight of land and barely an hour's steaming from a safe harbour when she disappeared off the radar.  When the wreck was located, it was in two pieces.  That may have happened as she sank, or it may have caused the sinking; but it is a fact that large ore-carriers have demonstrated a tendency to break in half.

Living on the shore of Lake Erie, this was big news when it happened. The mystery took years to solve.