Sunday, January 14, 2024

Watch your back (or fingers)

 


We’ve had a busy past couple of days, and not in a good way.

          My Guy was sitting with his phone the other day, updating Amazon tv kinds of things. It seemed we needed to update our information for the site, but when he got to the prompt that asked for bank account and routing numbers, he quickly closed out. Phew!

          Except I guess not quickly enough because his credit card was invaded. He called that into the card’s fraud people and canceled the card.

          Then a second card was hacked. Closed it. New cards in the mail. Fortunately, I usually travel with my LLBean credit card, which I have never used in the many years I’ve had it. I only have the account to order things now and then. I gave him that card until the other new ones arrived.

          He got up Thursday ready to leave for gym, but sat down to check accounts. Someone had accessed our back account and wired a significant amount of money to be drawn to them. *!#!@!  

           All of Thursday was spent contacting, first the bank (of course), and then the seemingly endless places that connect to our back account, and canceling the payments due to be drawn from the old account which would now bounce. You know, minor stuff like taxes and utilities.

          Late at night, before all this crashed down, he’d noticed an anomaly – someone had deposited 25 cents into our checking and 39 cents into our savings. Hmm. We now know that opened a pathway for the fraudsters and proved it was an active account.

          Three days later, we have a shiny new bank account (the old one was 50+ years old), leaving the old one available only for deposits so that his pension and Social Security payments can still arrive.

          And today we hope to finish a complete glossary of who we pay to and how the money gets there. Silver lining?

 

10 comments:

  1. Oh, Lord. What a nightmare. I'm so sorry you've gone through all that.

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    1. Well, on the upside, we're now super-duper financially organized.

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  2. Aaargh. The hackers are very, very clever indeed. I hope that you recover the monies stolen.

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    1. In fact, we did! I don't know what bothered me more - the potential of losing that money or the fact that the bad guys would profit.

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  3. Wow, scary. Glad you caught it quickly.

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  4. And I thought I was the only one with a regularly hacked credit card.

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  5. That's a stressful experience to go through. It seems that we just can't be too careful.

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  6. I'm so sorry this happened to you, but glad you got it all sorted.

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  7. I had a couple of unusual charges to my credit card a while back, and called the bank and canceled the card. Got a new one but yes, I had to go through that mess of trying to find out who all I paid through that card. So far we seem to be okay now. Sorry this happened to you!

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  8. Sad that some people see nothing wrong with that type of behavior.

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