It is Monday.
It is the first Monday in June... a new month begins.
Between a rock and a hard place...
My morning begins with a phone call (message) from my bank, asking about "suspicious looking" charges to my debit card.
Indeed. There are suddenly three "pending" $10 charges from Amazon Prime sitting there that I know are not mine... because the last thing I bought from Amazon were some seeds for our garden, back in March.
I check my Amazon account, and there is no order activity there, so I guess that account wasn't hacked, nor did one of the kids buy gaming tokens.
So I call the bank back and confirm that the charges are, indeed, not mine.
So whereas I am definitely grateful that the bank's fraud filters caught these transactions, I am now tasked with heading into town to pick up a new debit card, because the current one is now blocked, null and void.
I am grateful for the fact that the bank has the equipment to issue me a new debit card on the spot, but there's always a hassle factor there... I now have to go through all my stuff and make sure that any automatic bill pay payments tied to that account are now linked to the new account.
If I don't, I'll end up being charged late fees... which brings up the ironic situation that while the original fraudster/scammer will end up with nothing, the cost to me might become unexpected and unwanted late fees. Unless, of course, I catch all of them before they happen.
This is precisely the reason why I mostly avoid any kind of automated and/or recurring payments... and instead pay my bills "the old fashioned way:" by manually setting up and making a one-rime authorization every time.
Yes, I DID say "old fashioned."
So there's a couple of hours of my life I am not going to get back.
Of course, I hadn't planned to go to town today... so let's add the hassle factor and additional time factor, plus gas and wearing on my last good nerve.
What's My Point?
In general, we become annoyed with scams, fraud and thievery for a number of reasons; perhaps because we just feel it is plain wrong or whatever... but these things don't just steal your money they steal your time and your mental bandwidth.
As I finish the post, it has become the afternoon, and I now have a new debit card. It's actually my third one in about a year. The previous security issue requiring a new card was a security breach on some (allegedly secure) site where I had previously bought something... and it had been hacked.
While I was at the bank, the conversation I had with Linda — the branch manager — was precisely about the issue of how we develop better and better security encryption for online commerce... and meanwhile, the hackers are busy developing better and better algorithms to break that security.
The sad bottom line is that it seems like there are more and more individuals in the world who'd rather try to steal someone else's than actually create something useful for themselves.
I don't know what that says about us — as a species — but it strikes me as rather worrisome.
"I made my fortune the old fashioned way: I RIPPED OFF somebody!"
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great rest of your week!
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Created at 2024-06-03 18:58 PDT
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