For years we’ve batted away the pleas of Nigerian widows, deposed kings and even Jamie Dimon to hand over our credit cards in return for certain fortune.

We can spot them and their badly-spelled pitches from far off. But there’s a new scam on the block. It’s from online marketing agencies who pretend they know us by picking up clues on LinkedIn and faking up an e-mail that implies we went to university together — “Go Tigers!” or that we’re both writers and it sure is lonely, isn’t it?… but mainly that they’re wildly impressed with “Ramsay”.

These e-mails begin with: “Hey, Bob, I’m free at 4. How about we jump on a call for 10 minutes?” For the first one or two, I thought we must know each other. But of course not. What was I thinking? This is the internet.

It’s when you don’t reply that they up their game. “Bob, I haven’t heard back from you – would it be a ridiculous idea to see if we might be a good fit?”

Meanwhile…