Just had a run in with a young guy at the door claiming to be Lance Corporal soandoso from "the military" demanding to know who the homeowner was. Got aggressive when I asked what his business was (apparently the military needed to know for some "scheme").
He eventually produced a piece of card as identification which had no photo and started with text along the lines of "I'm here trying to bring you a friendly service ..." and there were some tick boxes on it and someone has signed it.
He refused to leave and started swearing when I said I'd call the cops.
I did. He finally left when he saw me on the phone. Would have been even better if I'd taken a photo. Funny how these really obvious things only occur to you after the event.
Used to have CCTV covering the doorway at my last house in Reading, and it was very good for dealing with such things as door-to-door scams, kids misbehaving in the street, fractious youths, etc. When I installed it, we definitely had a problem with a bunch of the latter getting out of hand, but a robbery and a CCTV enabled conviction later, and suddenly word got around. The street was much quieter after that.
If you do get CCTV, and it encodes the date and time into the video, ensure that the clock is always correct, particularly after the clocks have changed. Note that it should not enable you/her to see into people's houses, or parts of their gardens where they might reasonably expect to have their privacy respected. Note that you may have to put a notice somewhere reasonably visible saying that CCTV is in use. You may get people, even police officers, who do not know the law telling you that you need to be licensed under the RIPA, but this is untrue.
I used a unit that was part of a porch light, which had the great advantage that most pe>
It's not the money, it's the improbability of having spares bodies that aren't in Afghanistan or somewhere.
You did use to see uniformed nurses rattling tins in stations to raise money for hospital equipment; equally ludicrous. Never doctors, though; too busy playing golf maybe.
They used to pretend to have speech impediments, 'spazzing', to get sympathy and money. Presumably most people are wise to that and pretending to be a squaddy is the current one.
Someone much bigger than you, in an aggressive mood, at your door. You have to get said bat from behind door, hopefully without him noticing before you have it in your hands. Then you have to wield it convincingly, possibly within the constraints of a narrow corridor and certainly from within the house side of the door. And hope that he does not manage to overcome you in his by-now even more heightened anger.
If you do manage to hit him, you might have to justify the proportionality of your action to a court. "Could you have closed the door and rung the police?". "I could, but I thought it made more sense to cause bodily harm." Sounds as if it comes from the Vicky Pryce legal defence book.
Even if it did not get to that point, you can wind people up to the point at which they are determined to get their own back - somehow.
It's a shame that you didn't call the police - the information helps them target scammers. Often this is not individuals, a mini bus will drop loads of scammers into an area.
No idea what it was, but definitely some sort of scam. Military ID is very distinctive and consists of a plastic card with a photo of the cardholder and the MOD logo.
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Any real military person interacting with the public in this manner would be in uniform and would be polite - because a complaint to their CO would see them on a charge. And given the current state of MOD there are no "schemes" if this nature. The scammers are just hoping that mention of military authority will cause the law abiding citizens to welcome them into their homes.
I'd suspect their aim was distraction burglary and identity theft.
Frankfurt (AP) - Four Soviet soldiers lost while on manoeuvres in Czechoslovakia sold their tank to a pub owner for two cases of vodka, then were found sleeping it off in a forest two days later.
The tank was nowhere to be found. Authorities later learned that the publican had broken up the tank and sold the pieces to a metal-recycling centre, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported at the weekend. The article was by Mr Ota Filip, a Czechoslovan emigré author.
Yesterday he said the episode occurred during Warsaw Pact exercises in Czechoslovakia last year. He only learned of the incident in a letter from reliable sources bought to him by "friends" three weeks ago. Mr Filip's article quoted a report by police in eastern Bohemia.
The tank crew got lost as darkness was falling. It was cold, rainy, and foggy and they were running out of vodka, since rations had been cut as part of a Soviet campaign against alcoholism.
Around 9pm the tank drove a into a village where the only pub was still open. The crew parked in a shed behind the building and went into the pub as it was about to close
The soldiers had money for one bottle of vodka, but got three more after the tank commander plunked down his gold wedding-ring.
At 11.15, the crew was spotted leaving the pub with two cases of vodka and more than 61b of herring and pickles.
The men were found slumbering in a forest two days later. They told local authorities and the Soviet military police they did not know what had happened to the tank. The first clue turned up 10 days later, when the head of a metal-recycling plant said he had just bought a large amount of high-quality, sawn-up steel from a pub owner.
Investigators soon found the shell of the tank in the shed behind the pub. The proprietor told the authorities he had acquired the tank for
24 bottles of vodka, with herring and pickles thrown in "as a gesture of comradeship".
Mr Filip said the fate of the pub owner and the Soviet soldiers was not known.
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