What would you do for £5,000? The Observer put itself to the test on 29 January 1995 by placing a small ad in Private Eye, ‘posing as a friendly if somewhat feckless and impecunious postgraduate in need of some quick cash’ – anything considered.
The advert drew two proposals. ‘I don’t want to discuss it on the telephone,’ the first respondent said, before claiming: ‘It’s not illegal.’ He put the author in touch with an associate, Juliet, who ‘immediately asked me if I realised “it” was a bit dodgy.’ It was, though, she said, fun and the fringe benefits were very good. ‘It just had to be pornography.’ It was stranger than that: a scam involving travelling the country visiting electrical retailers and requesting, under false pretences, a Sky satellite box coded card to access paid-for channels (they were then sent abroad to be sold at a profit).
Juliet showed the reporter the ropes in the Brent Cross branch of Dixons, assuring him it was safe; she ‘later admitted three people had been caught so far and prosecuted for attempted deception’. It wasn’t the crime that bothered the writer so much as the lonely succession of ‘A-roads, shopping centres, drizzly high streets and B&Bs’.
Things got even stranger with the second assignment: ‘A lady from Croydon named Sheila wrote seeking the return of her Persian cat’. She was only offering £500 but apparently beggars could not be choosers. The quest to find Tibbles became a real shaggy dog story: Sheila had given him away, but wanted him back; the woman who had taken him in said he was dead.
There were claims (‘She will tell you a pack of lies’) and counter-claims (‘The lady is ill’) and a private detective from Basildon who was simultaneously called in on the same mission and was seemingly more successful at it: ‘Simon’s doing a very, very good job.’ But neither of the rival investigators could locate Tibbles, or confirm his passing. Sheila eventually lost patience, shouting at the journalist, ‘You’re a bloody nuisance!’ Like Tibbles, the £500 remained missing.