You Never Know What a Day Will Bring

Well, you never know what a day will bring…

Or a week…

One week ago I came back from vacation to discover two nice big fat bills from Sprint/Nextel. There was also a “letter,” yeah, one of THOSE. We only owed them $5000. So, someone had used our basic public church info plus a phony EIN number to set up an account at some kiosk in town. Did the clerk ask for any ID? Any proof of connection? Of course not. Well, to make a long story short, I reported it to the police and to Sprint's fraud division and we’ve been cleared of responsibility. Why do these companies make it so easy for people to defraud others?

Oh, and did I say that almost all the calls were one or two minutes or less? Yep…drugs…

Well, a week later, this past Monday, I was checking my personal bank account to get a number for an expense report issue, and was surprised to find my checking account was empty. I scrolled down and there was a check for pretty much all I had, written to a lady in Texas, all typed, no signature. That freaked me out a little. I called Wachovia, and after waiting a very long time I finally got a guy in their fraud division, or loss division, or whatever they call it. This guy was like a secret service/FBI dude. I kept wanting to say, "yes sir" or "yes, officer." He took one look at the online photo of the check and said, “Mr. Gillespie, this is what has happened.”

He went on to tell me that I probably had a key logger virus or Trojan on my system, that it had hijacked my username and pass code and sent it probably to somewhere in Russia or Iran or Iraq. Seriously, he said these schemes were usually terrorist related and were a huge big deal for Homeland Security. Then someone used the numbers to log into my online account, set up bill pay, and write the check to the lady in Texas, whom he said was also likely a victim, someone who had fallen for some sort of phishing scam run by the same outfit, and they just link two “victims” together. Thankfully I caught it before the check had time to get to her, and they were going to take care of notifying her. Plus they refunded all the money to me. He told me to take both computers (home and office) in to a place that could use more powerful software than what I had, and have them deep scanned. I did that, and we found the key logger Trojan! Nasty little devil. Then I had to go to the bank, change all my numbers, and of course contact the gazillion companies that draft out of my account. So, that was my week. I just got set up and am ready to work again.

So, I decided to move to upper Manitoba, right? Wrong. I decided never to do online banking again, right? Wrong.

As I was telling a friend, I have been rear ended six time since I have lived in Greensboro (no, I don’t have a bumper sticker that says hit me! And every time I was stopped at a light or a stop sign!) So, am I not going to drive because of that?

There is a risk to “being connected.” I have about as much software as my 1 gigabyte of RAM can manage with which to protect my systems. I did get yet one more even more powerful spyware program that uses so many resources I can only have it “on” when I actually run it. But that’s about all I can do. You spend $120 or so dollars a year on this software you get $120 dollars a year of protection. I can’t really go to the next level.

I’ll be more careful with what I throw away. I am going to get a shredder for home. I might even stop putting checks out in the postbox. But life goes on, and everything carries a risk.

OK, yes, it used up a week of my life. But I got to talk to so many nice people…

And yes, I know, I should have been running a Mac. Send me 5K and I’ll get two good ones.

Joel