START the week by testing your gullibility. Imagine yourself in a hotel bar chatting idly to some Rolex-owner on the next stool. He tells you he is doing a deal that involves 21,000 tonnes of gold. Do you 1) work out that this is enough for a full-sized replica of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and tell him he is lying. Or 2) continue listening, impressed. After an hour, he confides that he is a bit short of a couple of thousand dollars while the deal is signed. If you lend him the money, he will repay you double when the deal is done in a few weeks. Do you 1) make your excuses and leave. Or 2) go to the bank, get the cash, and hand it over. Our legal informant tells us that there are at least three syndicates operating in Hongkong at the moment looking for people who answered (2) to both questions - and finding them. One of the fascinating things is how easy it is to scrape together apparently rock-solid proof that the deal you are helping lubricate is real. Anyone can fake a bullion certificate because no-one knows what a real bullion certificate looks like. Certificates of deposit and bonds are another favourite for faking, for the same reason. Our advice to anyone being pestered by this sort of crook is easy. Lend them a million dollars - you'll never be bothered by them again. Ad hic WHILE enjoying a drink in the Bull and Bear pub in Hutchison House, Alex Macdonald of Balfour Beatty spotted some truth-in-advertising on their list of liqueur coffees. The coffee made with Drambuie, a drink supposedly invented by Bonnie Prince Charlie, lost an 'n' somewhere and was advertised as ''Bonnie Price'' ''They were right,'' he noted, eyeing the bill. Shell company WITH two weeks passing after the peak period for reporting their annual profits, the Post Office begins the laborious task of delivering thick annual reports to shareholders. Shareholders also begin the laborious job of reading them. HSBC Holdings, parent of Hongkong Bank, has the dullest we've seen so far. Last year's attractive format with interesting satellite photographs of Hongkong, Shanghai, New York and elsewhere, has been dumped. In this year's annual report, which has 68 pages of dense type, there is only one photograph. It is of chairman Sir Willie Purves. He is smiling slightly, presumably because he is thinking of the cash saved on printing costs. At the other extreme is toy company Playmates, which is so keen to put Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and cute kids on the front they don't even have room for their proper name, Playmates International Holdings. Keep it away from the children, though. Their innocence will be ended when they discover Star Trek is ''an entertainment property'' and those lovable green pizza-eating heroes in a half-shell are a ''a robust toy property''. Horse sense A COMMENT from a caller on Ralph Pixton's Open Line programme on RTHK on Saturday about prostitution. ''I think it should be made legal, then the Jockey Club could run it and all the money could go to charity.'' Eating disorder A PHYSICIAN from Springfield, Missouri, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine finding a new health hazard, the Voracious Shredder Syndrome, as close as his own office. Dr Douglas Brockman reported that his office manager was shredding some documents when the man's tie became entangled in the mechanism. ''Fortunately, he is a rather quick thinker and blindly engaged the 'off' button as his chin contacted the surface of the machine,'' Brockman wrote. ''The patient was extracted by a senior physician using standard office scissors to separate and excise the offending cravat. ''Our patient experienced mild and temporary post-operative neck pain, but a permanent psychological aversion to standard ties in favour of bow ties.'' Urban gorilla THE Bank of China Tower has a tenant called King Kong Real Estate. Are their offices inside the building, or do they spend their working day hanging on to those big spikes on the top? Pretty dim FRED Fredricks, the US tax specialist, has solved the riddle of the syndrome where letters have both letterhead and signature the wrong way up. ''All you have to do is use a computerised word processor and stick the letterhead in upside down,'' he says. We think you'd have to be pretty dim to do that. Nury Vittachi returns tomorrow
