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Pre's & After's - What's hot and what's not
The school formal has become 3 different events in the one night. One or more of them can potentially ruin the other ones. Find out how to ensure all are awesome so that this night is perfect all around.
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that venue directly to check whether the company you’re dealing with is actually an authorised agent of that venue.
3/ Get it in writing. Anything you’re offered, promised or guaranteed cannot be considered as real unless or until you have it on an official letterhead or branded email. Make sure it’s specific, detailed and contains all the right elements such as company ABN, dates, name and title of the person you’re dealing with. In the case of function bookings, there have to be quotes, contracts, terms and conditions and there has to be a copy of everything for you to keep in your own records.
If anyone is not willing to give it all to you in writing, then you should view this as extremely suspicious and start checking.
4/ Never deal in cash. Real companies with real bank accounts have invoices, EFT, cheque systems, Paypal accounts and Bank Merchant Facilities. They can process any
type of payment so how they receive your money is not relevant. If anyone asks for cash, this is not normal so beware!
5/ Site inspections are no solid guarantee. If anyone offers you a venue inspection, by all means go and take a look but be sure to ask that an actual functions staff member from the venue is present, that you get their business card, and call the venue to check that the person you met actually works there. No venue should ever offer you a site inspection unless the room they’re offering you for your formal is available to see at that time.
Remember, where there is money, scammers exist. Where there are vulnerable people, scammers exist. Where there are exciting experiences, scammers exist. School formals are the place where all of these things come together, so you should always be vigilant for scammers because they’re waiting for you.
Public Enemies
A, B and C
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Formal Scammers
...Continued from page 8
These are the three
most often used,
and most often
discovered,
methods for trying to smuggle liquor into a formal.
Suspect A/
The glass Bacardi Rum bottle is probably the most stupid choice of the most unsuccessful smuggler. Aside from being heavy glass, both the cap and the label are made of metal that will trigger even the lowest quality metal detector on the market. It's also too big to fit into your pocket without looking totally obvious.
Suspect B/
The plastic Smirnoff Vodka Bottle has been the preferred choice of illegal booze fiends at formals for many years now.
While being completely plastic, therefore able to slip past metal detectors, this old favourite's days are now numbered.
Security teams trained in the formals market now have the benefit of thermal imaging technology, which this popular product cannot beat. You see while the bottle can warm to your own body temperature while strapped to a thigh, or stuffed down the jocks, the alcohol content inside will never come within around 5 degrees celcius of that, making this stick out like a sore thumb from up to 30 metres away, even under several layers of clothes.
Beyond that, state governments have now begun the process of banning the retail sale of these altogether so it won't be long before you'll have to start pouring your Smirnoff into another plastic bottle, which of course won't be able to beat those dreaded thermal cameras either. Oh well!
Suspect C/
The little hotel bar fridge versions of your favourite joy juice. These have been successful in the past however, unfortunately, those retched thermal cameras can see these too, and even clearer than the bigger bottles.
Of course, even if you are lucky enough to manage to get one of these into the formal, they only hold enough for barely one shot so you may end up going through all this concealment effort for a 50/50 chance of catching one sip inside the event, which hardly constitutes a fabulous covert success in smuggling risk versus reward.
Give it up people!
You've made it through HSC, you're smarter than this!