Saved by the bank

Being a Thursday (and not having a Talking Newspaper) today was all about the housework. Being something that rarely (if ever) varies, it made an interesting change when I had a strange text message.

When I receive text messages or phone calls from numbers I don’t recognise, I run the number through a search engine to see if anyone else has had dealings with it. There are quite a few forums designed to help in the prevention of being ripped off by using the power of many users. It’s rare that I don’t get a hit.

The numbers can be legit but they can also be premium rate lines which charge a fortune to text or call. They can also be direct lines to scam artists who think it’s fair to deprive normal people of their hard earned money. The number I had the text from looked a bit suspicious. It claimed to be from our bank asking about a possibly dodgy credit card transaction. That’s fine because it’s just a matter of ringing the bank however the text asked for a response (yes or no) and it was this I was concerned about.

I had a few hits on the number I’d searched and it seemed the number was from the bank. To be sure, I rang the bank and it was, indeed, a legit text message so I stopped the transaction which was far from legit. Someone, somewhere with all the morality of a sea slug, had tried to buy some sort of electronics from a website that sells high end cameras and sound equipment. This lowlife had used Mirinda’s credit card…or, rather, a copy of her credit card, since she still had the original.

I thought it was all taken care of when, later in the day, I had a robotic phone call from the bank querying another transaction, this time for clothing. Again, I rang the bank to check it was kosher. It was a bank robot. And the transaction was another bogus attempt to extract money from us. I cancelled the payment and the bank happily cancelled the card. So, all happy. Apart from the slimeball arsehole and he doesn’t really matter.

What this episode highlighted is how vulnerable technology makes us. We have warnings in place to give us an opportunity to stop a payment before it happens but then there’s scumbags who exploit this by creating fake security texts and phone calls. I feel sorry for people who implicitly trust anything that purports to come from an authoritive source. It’s better to trust no-one until their trust is proven.