LOTS of people must wonder why they still have a traditional telephone at home.

They used to be essential – and if you want broadband, you still have to pay for a landline – but now they seem to be just a channel for scammers and the worst kind of marketers.

I literally can’t remember when I last had a call to the landline which wasn’t of the nuisance variety.

Sometimes, it’s that old favourite, the Windows Tech Support scam. The one where the caller says they’re from Microsoft and there’s something wrong with your computer, as a precursor to getting you to hand over some money.

You’re advised to hang up straight away, but occasionally I’ve kept them on the line, in the hope that if I can waste their time a bit, I might be preventing them from scamming someone else.

Once, when the caller opened with “Is that Mr Slade?”, I found that answering “Well, they usually call me Chief Inspector Slade…” caused the call to end pretty quickly.

Some people will fall victim to the phone scammers, and some others will feel inclined to judge them for being gullible. But that’s unfair, because even those of us who don’t fall for an old chestnut like the Windows scam might well have come a cropper elsewhere.

If you haven’t been the victim of a con, it might well show that your caution and scepticism have kept you safe so far. But it might also indicate that you’ve been fortunate enough not to run into the right scam for you. And the online world has drastically multiplied the number of ways for us to get rooked.

Earlier this week, I went to a cyber security event at Bournemouth University, organised by Bournemouth businessman Gordon Fong. Mr Fong, incidentally, didn’t do anything there to plug his own companies or services – he just brought together a lot of people who had good advice and valuable experience to share.

During that evening, some very intelligent people told how they had either been scammed out of hard-earned money, or had come pretty close. There was an online element to most of these crimes, sometimes backed up by phone conversations with people who weren’t who they seemed to be.

The world is full of heartbreaking stories of people who have been scammed out of money they cannot afford to lose. Often, they have freely given personal information or made payments to fraudsters, making it very hard for them to argue that they should be recompensed by their bank.

Many scammers are smart enough to have gone far in the working world. But they’re also smart enough to know that there’s better money to be made in the fraud industry, where the hours are flexible and you never have to go to team meetings.

It’s not victim-blaming to say that it would be a good idea for us all to educate ourselves as much as possible about the risks of being swindled.

We all know we should lock our doors and windows and beware of passing tradespeople who’ve noticed our roof tiles need fixing. Similarly, we should do what we can to keep ourselves safe from swindlers.

When it comes to online cons, the problem is that cyber-security can seem like the dullest subject in the world, until you come a cropper. Then it becomes vitally important.

We want our lives to be as easy as possible – to access bank accounts online, run around using contactless payment methods, and not waste undue time faffing around with passwords and security. And that can work against our safety.

That event at the university made me resolve not to complain so often about having to change my computer password or about waiting while my computer installs updates (even though they always seem to take effect when I’ve been working late and am trying to leave).

We all need to protect ourselves as best we can – and cross our fingers that we don’t run into the scam that’s perfect for us.