Like me, you probably get lots of cold calls, junk mail and spam email. It’s a wonder we find time to do any work. I’m taking phone calls from people asking to speak to ‘the owner of the business ’. I’m deleting emails kindly offering to increase the size of my sales or give me part of a large fortune in exchange for a small payment. If I’m not busy with that, I’m sorting through leaflets and letters selling me things I already have or don’t want and placing them in the recycling bin whilst offering a silent prayer for the wasted lives of all those trees.

There have been attempts to stem this flood of junk. My spam filter is pretty effective. You can also go on mailing and telephone preference lists but this doesn’t apply to businesses and doesn’t stop recorded calls or leaflets through the letterbox. You may wonder if anyone ever responds to offers too good to be true from people and companies whom they don’t know and who clearly don’t know them. Well, I know someone. To protect his identity, I’ll call him ‘Dad’. This gentleman in his eighties isn't stupid but he was naive. He bought an alarm system from a company exposed by Watchdog, a walk-in bath from a company that a leading charity for disabled people has said don’t meet their standards and superfast broadband when he only uses the internet for emails. Fortunately his son stopped him buying solar panels for £25,000 that would ‘pay for themselves in 25 years’.

He is no longer so trusting and has now learnt that however plausible these people seem, he needs to use his superfast broadband to google companies and products before purchasing. Greedy people will always be vulnerable to a con but the rest of us needn’t fall for them. There may be more scams than ever invading our offices and homes but, thanks to the internet, there are plenty of people happy to keep us informed about them.

Having said all that, I have reason to be grateful to a spammer. About a month ago, I started receiving some six emails a day all with the same subject line. They were sent from different addresses to try to circumvent my spam filter but the content was always the same. The domain name yourlifeyourstyle.com would soon be available to purchase and I could only buy it from them- at a significant price.

Now, when we started Your Life Your Style, we didn’t realise how important online selling would become. So I registered yourlifeyourstyle.co.uk but wasn’t too concerned about the fact that someone else owned .com, especially since it was dormant. Over the years, our online sales grew until they now account for a third of our sales. It became clear that it would be useful to own yourlifeyourstyle.com if only to prevent someone else using it.

There is usually a grain of truth in the best scams, so, when I received this steady stream of emails, I made some enquiries of my own and found that ownership of it had indeed lapsed. There is always a period of grace when this happens but it was due to become available in the next few weeks, so no-one owned it, certainly not the spammer. To cut a long story short, I am now the proud owner of the dot com domain - and without any help from a spammer who would happily have taken considerable sums of money from me and might or might not have obtained the domain name.

Anyway, I must go- the phone’s ringing.