You and I are just too smart to get scammed. Ain’t that true? Course it is. It’s only elderly people who get scammed. We all watch Scam Intercepters. And we’re wise so those telephone calls from Kolkata telling us that our Amazon accounts have been compromised. Or an email pretending to be from our bank and inviting us to resubmit our bank account details.
But this email was not pretending to be from my bank. Nor was it asking for any financial information. In fact it appeared so routine as to be convincing. It was just one of those occasional emails which we get from our email providers inviting us to update our log in details. And of course I fell for it. Next day i started to get telephone calls from various professional contacts querying emails which they had received from this account and which appeared suspicious. That’s when I knew that my account has been compromised. I logged on to my email account and a warning flashed up alerting me to the fact that emails were being forwarded to another account which had been set up in a similar name. I cancelled the forwarding and then tried to change the password on my account. But that was impossible because the fraudster managed to circumvent the two-stage verification process by deleting my cellphone number and substituting the email address of the account which had already been hacked. How scary is that? So I took my laptop to the computer shop at the end of my road. With the proprietor’s help, I was able to get logged in and change the password. Though as soon as I got home and logged on again, I discovered that the email account had defaulted back to the fraudster’s settings. How were they able to do that? Again, I did not receive any alert to my cellphone
So it was all about damage limitation. Whilst I was still able to log into the email account, I permanently deleted everything which I could and alerted my email contacts to the scam. Then I was locked out of my email account completely. It was now late evening. So there was nothing else to do except to take a tablet and to try to get a few hours sleep. Maybe my subconscious could work on it overnight and come up with a solution. That night I dreamed that a family of squatters had obtained a key to my house and set up home. When I protested, most of them left quietly, except one man, whom I had to wrestle out of my front door. When I woke up yesterday morning, I knew exactly what I had to do. First thing was to log onto the Report Fraud website and make a formal report.
Look! I’m not expecting the Metropolitan Police to initiate a major crime scene investigation. The purpose of my report was to create a documentary record of the fraud which will protect me from liability if anyone tries to fraudulently take out a loan or purchase goods in my name. My next step was to contact the email provider, who helped me to get back into the account and change the password. But again, the change was not permanent as I later had to use the two-step verification process to log in again and change that password and also change the settings. That time it worked. So it is still not as secure as I would want it to be
One of the things I’ve always tried to do is to keep all of my accounts 100% separate from each other. I will never use mobile banking. Or set up my cellphone to make purchases. It’s just not worth the risk.
BRUCE AND HOLLY 