The message had the feel of a “Nigerian prince” scam, a lame attempt to get the targeted recipient to transfer large sums of money. If you’ve seen those messages, by now you recognize the broken English and comical structure of the request.
The email went something like this:
“Not one person has paid me to check about you.”
Well, good, this was entirely random. No one paid to have me blackmailed.
He (or she) went on to explain that my entire contact list had been acquired and that if I didn’t comply with his request, embarrassing information would be sent to everyone I know.
Not a problem. I regularly embarrass myself in front of friends.
“Best solution would be to pay me $1007. You'll make the payment via Bitcoin.
You could go on your life like this never happened and you will not ever hear back again from me.”
At this point buddy, I’m going to “go on my life” and keep the $1007.
“I know xxxxxxxx is one of your password on day of hack.”
And that’s when things got chillingly creepy. The cited password was indeed mine. Granted, it was an old password, a simple one from back in the days when merchants didn’t recommend, or insist, that you come up with a unique combination of letters, numbers and special characters. It was one that I used for local restaurants or random clothing websites where I didn’t store credit card information.
What had undoubtedly happened was that this person had purchased a list of hacked passwords and emails on the dark web. There have been numerous security breeches at major merchants during the past year. Even systems used by my former employer’s HR department have been compromised. We received two apologies from them accompanied by instructions for following up on the data loss with a year of free identity theft protection.
If you’re like me, you have lots of passwords. If you’re really like me you have them alphabetized and organized by category. After some cleanup and updating I have 200 active passwords. They are strong, unique, stored offline and changed periodically. They are also worth way more than $1007, which is just a really strange amount. So Thomas Johnson will have to seek his small fortune elsewhere, but it was a good reminder that there are bad actors out there, sitting at home just like us during the pandemic with plenty of time on their hands.
A related story came to my attention just hours before I wrote this. Someone who shall remain nameless was recently contacted by her grandson.
“Hello Grandma, it’s Bobby”
Now, Bobby never calls this person “Grandma” and his voice sounded strange.
“Oh, it didn’t sound like you Bobby.”
“Yeah, I have a cold.”
“Bobby” went on to explain that the friend he was with got in an accident. When the police came they found drugs in the car and they had both been arrested. He needed $9000 to make bail and had been appointed a lawyer.”
“Please promise you won’t tell my parents.”
By this point, both Bobby and a thoroughly convinced Grandma were sobbing to each other on the phone. The “lawyer” took over and explained the need for confidentiality due to the nature of the arrest. Grandma refused to keep this situation secret, and with that the call ended.
This is the classic grandparent scam that has sadly increased dramatically during the pandemic. As a recipient of AARP’s magazine, I’ve read repeatedly about this, and coincidentally an article was in the latest issue that arrived today.
Almost daily we hear 2020 referred to as “these challenging times” or some other such catchphrase. They are indeed.
😎
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