Letters to the Editor: Pay on delivery solution to online scams

Readers address online scams, Gaza, abortion figures, and Cork dereliction

One reader says that pay on delivery would put all online scammers out of business.

It is my opinion that apart from a few well-known and respected companies, online shopping has now become a nightmare due to all the scammers, both national and international, trying to steal your details, clear out your bank account, and invade your privacy.

The following is the perfect solution to the problem and would put all online scammers out of business: pay on delivery. Where one is directed to “payment details” online, there can be a payment on delivery option, which could be carried out by credit or debit card. From an IT perspective, this should be relatively easy to achieve.

The savings on a national and international scale would be colossal, not to mention the extensive hours worked by police, banks, and other financial institutions attempting to catch the scammers.

I accept that couriers would have to be equipped to handle the transactions and provided with the equipment and training but the rewards would be well worth it. Hence pre-approved transactions would be the best option.

The following are five main points of this proposal:

Genuinely, you would not order something unless you had the money or credit to pay for it and wanted it. This can be pre-approved on the card or couriers could carry a mobile card machine.

Couriers would be unemployed unless they took payment and forwarded it most likely electronically.

A quick glimpse would prove that you got what you ordered, with a scam you pay and get nothing.

Supermarkets and restaurants presently operate this system and have no problems.

Scammers would be eliminated instantly as they would get nothing.

Paddy Dervan, Tinahley, Co Wicklow

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Hopelessness of tragedy in Gaza

The majority of people observing the monumental tragedy in Gaza feel a sense of hopelessness at the ongoing senseless killing of civilians. How can the world be letting this happen before our eyes? Is there nothing more that can be done?

There is almost a sense of tragedy fatigue as we watch war crime after war crime perpetrated relentlessly and reported every day on our news channels. Some images are indelible — the video of a grandmother hand in hand with her grandchild crossing a square and being killed by an IDF sniper as the child runs to safety.

The image of seven-year-old Sidra Hassouna’s mutilated body hanging from a wall beside the place where all her family died in Rafah. The video of a preteen boy screaming in anguish over the dead body of his toddler brother. Future recruitment material for Hamas? This is all alongside the recognition of the terrible suffering brought to Israel by the Hamas atrocities and hostage taking of October 7.

But the disproportionate killing in Gaza continues.

There is the confusion for us all of trying to understand the mystifying logic of the decisions of Joe Biden, possibly the only person on the planet capable of stopping the suffering in Gaza by not blocking proposed UN resolutions for a ceasefire and more importantly by not sending bombs used by a conscienceless Netanyahu to kill innocent Palestinian civilians. And all the while Biden sends contradictory weak and meaningless entreaties to Netanyahu to avoid civilian deaths, that are constantly rebuffed and ignored. Biden has not used his real leverage — the withdrawal of military support from Netanyahu’s administration.

Without doubt, Biden has been complicit in the deaths of over 30,000 Palestinians to date. And in the process he has irreparably damaged his own reputation and, as a result, potentially may lose the US presidential election in November, leaving the way open to the disastrous prospect of anti-democratic Trump as US president.

Between them, Biden and Netanyahu have brought great harm to both Israel/Palestine and the US.

Shame on us all as observers in the international community for not stopping their gallop.

C Vandamme, Newport, Co Tipperary

US moral authority?

Why did America use an inefficient air drop to try to deliver famine-averting aid to Gaza? Why did that superpower and cheerleader for Israel’s barbarisms not simply deliver the goods to one of Gaza’s ports?

Does America imagine the Israelis might oppose them, maybe using weapons Uncle Sam gave to the IDF in earlier shipments?

Tragically, America’s remaining moral authority as the world’s policeman is compromised by its role in facilitating the ongoing genocide in that artificially contrived enclave — or human abattoir if you prefer cold, unambiguous language.

That the need for such a presence is made all the greater by surging autocracy around the world just deepens the tragedy for those of us who hope the world’s liberal democracies can endure.

Jack Power, Inniscarra, Cork

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Repeal unfulfilled

Your edition of March 2 highlights what is seen by many abortion rights supporters as ‘gaps’ in the system, six years after repeal of the Eighth Amendment. In 2018, the year of repeal, between illegally imported pills and trips abroad, abortions to Irish women were roughly 4,500. During the referendum campaign, voters were told by those seeking repeal that the legalisation of abortion would actually reduce demand, with abortion here becoming a rarity. Yet, from the latest available figures for 2023, the fifth year following repeal, the country’s abortion figure looks to be upward of 10,000, with nobody in officialdom striving (a current buzzword) to reduce the numbers, or promoting more life-affirming alternatives for women and their unborn offspring.

If there are gaps in the system, surely many of them must relate to unfulfilled promises regarding supports for women in difficult circumstances, and a failure to acknowledge, as repeal supporter Nell McCafferty once put it, that ‘abortion is the last resort, not the first, of womanhood’.

Rory O’Donovan, Killeens, Cork

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Cork dereliction

Cork City has become a ghetto of our times. How we have allowed the level of dereliction to take over our proud city is incomprehensible. The streets are now littered with vape shops, bookies, and addicts and are no longer safe to walk, day or night. Run-down buildings, shut down retail and restaurants together with the anti-car policy developed over recent years have led to the city becoming a ‘no go’ area.

We have lost the character and personality of our home by the Lee and surely there is something that can be done before we pull the shutters down on our beloved city forever...

Cathal O’Herlihy, Blackrock, Cork