banker.in.trouble @ gmail. com

A friend of mine – I will call him Alex (not his real name, I re-emphasise) - was one of the earliest Indian adopters of gmail, which advantage gave him a ‘generic’ mail address: his email id is, simply, alex @ gmail.com. This initially was quite a bother, since he ended up with a number of mails offering propositions of marriage. Indeed, as he says, while some offered him loans, one mail offered him a transplanted heart, many combined the two to offer lonely hearts. As you can see, Alex is not without a sense of humour, and he has put it to good use.

Sometime ago, he received a cryptic email from a relationship manager at a foreign bank Alex has no connection with. “Please find enclosed your mutual fund statement and let me know if you want me to do anything.” Quite obviously, this banker had the wrong guy. When Alex clicked on the PDF file that had the statement, he got quite a shock. There were about two million dollars of savings in there, invested (wisely, no doubt), by an adroit man of the same name as he, in a set of mutual fund schemes.

Well, Alex thought a bit and sent a reply to the banker. “Please sell everything and transfer the proceeds to my account. Don’t tell my wife,” he added for good measure.

For some days there was no return mail. You can well visualise an assiduous banker, burning the midnight oil (and catalysing his ubiquitous ulcer) in carrying out the instruction from a wealthy client who was going through some active turbulence at home. About a week later, the banker sent Alex a terse mail that read: “Please delete all mail communication from this mail id. Do not respond to this mail.” One can only imagine the spanking that he must have got from his client, whose carefully built portfolio of gilt edged funds was now liquidated into a savings account.

I am sure there is a lesson here somewhere (other than, be careful of Alex)………