Nopesport

by **Mrs H** » Fri Oct 23, 2009 5:18 pm

I was thinking about something Blanka said about the number of orienteers in former "eastern bloc" countries and given the numbers of in-comers from those regions we are always reading about in the papers - do you suppose there is any scope for recruitment among their ranks?

by **Catfish** » Fri Oct 23, 2009 9:41 pm

No

After I ran in the SE Sprints in Canterbury I went into the city centre, which to my surprise was inundated with P----- U- white fellow EU members. I suppose it made a change from our home grown likewise element the only difference is I couldn't make out what they were shouting about:!: :!:

by **graeme** » Fri Oct 23, 2009 9:55 pm

We just got asked to send written invitation letters to Moldova for the Scottish Score and, um Craigmillar limited colour coded. :shock:

Definitely a recruitment prospect :roll:

by **Zaphod Beeblebrox** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 12:38 pm

BEWARE! This is a scam that has been attempted on several unsuspecting sports clubs, not just orienteering clubs.

You get a letter with odd wording that you attribute to poor English, but after a bit of probing you establish that they want a letter of introduction to get them into the country in order to attend some event about which they know stuff all. The one thing for sure is that once they have got it, you will not hear from them again.

I had one from Moldova (alledgedly) that said the writer was a sports administrator with a team of orienteers coming to Britain to compete in some un-named event and they would also like to come to one of our events - which happened to be a summer evening event in a local park. They asked for aiport & accommodation details. Then they asked for a letter of introduction. Now if they were legitimate they would already have had the letter for their primary event(s). But no, they wanted a letter to let them visit Britain to to take part in a local summer evening event. The smell of rotten fish increased with every exchange until I broke contact.

On discussion with other club members it became apparant that this was an old trick.
So my advice to everyone is to ignore any correspondence of this nature; it is a scam.

by **roadrunner** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 5:46 pm

I'd agree with Zaphod's comments. It seems to be a scam to get into the UK.

A couple of years back I was handling entries for a road race, and got an email from someone in Africa (I forget the country) claiming to be an elite runner and asking for the same thing. After discussion with others, I replied suggesting he enter online first in the usual way and asking him for evidence of past performance, and we heard no more.

by **Knee Deep Mud!** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 7:49 pm

I had the Moldovan EMail enquiring about attending the summer evening event I was planning earlier this year. As it sounded like a scam EMail, I did a search on Google, and found several threads on various worldwide non-orienteering sports forums querying almost word for word identical EMails over a couple of year period. I assumed it was spam and didn't bother replying. Real contacts from real people are usually much more obvious, even if the language barrier means the English isn't that good.