A heart pounding cyber adventure

Our brush with thieves

Since my heart issue, and going off Ozempic, another column for another day, I have been a clean machine, a sober sap and total teetotaler with the exception of tea. Which means after surviving three months of unfiltered reality (A recovering alcoholic once told me “SOBER” stands for “Son Of A Bitch Everything’s Real) and the concomitant cleansing of THC and alcohol from this ancient wrinkled husk I am innocent as a babe and now a cheap high. I can get a buzz off an aspirin rivaling anything I read in Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”. Toss down an Acetaminophen PM and granddad here has technicolor dreams Maxfield Parrish would envy.

My story begins with the emerging side effect of one of my new heart meds, a Beta Blocker. Two a day, has been giving me the grins. I told my cardiologist, “I am feeling the side effect the manufacturer describes as ‘lethargy’; only I would call it ‘mild euphoria’.”

Hmm.

As well as slowing my pulse to it’s former healthy happy pulsing samba rate the Beta-blocker has also slowed me into a curiously pleasant state that even my wife has noticed. What happened to the lovable bitter sarcastic curmudgeon which she married? My beloved sarcastically characterizes this state as “Easy-going Dave”. I call the condition the “Mahatma Loopy state of being” and yes, while medicated, I do operate heavy machinery ranging from chainsaws to jack hammers while driving as often as possible.

I was enjoying a a loopy Saturday morning sipping coffee with Ellen at our cluttered dining table, when my phone chirp chirp chirped at me. I picked it up and read an alarming text above an ignored earlier alarming text that must have popped up on my phone at 5:30AM while I was dreaming of wandering through a golden gilded age mansion staffed by servants who all resembled Nefertiti. The consecutive messages were both on a secure SMS line that PayPal used to send me codes and alerts in the past. Loopy “easy-going” me said, “I’ll take care of this after I test my blood pressure,” a thrilling ritual that rivets my attention every morning. Well, look at that blood pressure spike. Thanks, PayPal. What’s up?

The early morning message read, ”PayPal: You've got a new money request. Pay at: https://py.pl/5LRWy.Osinskiqv Whitneyiv.kj Whitneyiv.kj sent a request for $599.99 USD."

The present alert on the “secure line” from PayPal read, "PayPal: Fraud Alert, Didn't make this order? Call PayPal immediately at +1 (845) 630-1154. Otherwise PayPal didn't has canceled the money request for $599.99 USD. Log in to your PayPal account for more details.”

Mistake Number One

My Brain says to me,”Oh, look, a familiar text on a familiar secure line.” Deep in my cranium, behind my occipital lobe, and west of my Corpus Callosum, my Mahatma Loopus gland overrode any flashing synapses that might have noticed the glaring syntax error "didn't has canceled.”

Didn’t has canceled? Good grief.

Apparently my brain had been conditioned by the typos in the local paper to expect and overlook such errors. Which is why I didn't has canceled our subscription yet.

Suspicious of the text’s veracity I opened my laptop and looked at the PayPal website to verify the phone number and there it was on the familiar PayPal website. Same number.

Mistake Number Two

I logged online to my secure banking site. Everything looked fine. The numbers. The accounts. I called the PayPal phone number. A voice answered,”PayPal.”

I was passed along up the line through two “PayPal” employees, up the “PayPal” chain, each verifying my identity by name and phone number. I put our conversation on speaker phone so my wife could bear witness as I was handed up the chain to a "manager" who informed me I would be "refunded the amount noted in a previous transaction deemed fraudulent by ‘PayPal’.”

He called me “Sir”.

In the past I would simply respond with a simple text asking PayPal to decline the transaction. This simpleton began to suspect something was not right.

Mistake Number Three

The "manager" asked me to go to my Chase account online. Did he not know my laptop was already open and I had been looking right at my online account the entire time we’d been talking? “Sir, we need to verify your account. We are sending you a small share of the $599 to be refunded to you to your account.”

What?

What I saw next pulled a fire alarm between my ears. A programming code block appeared on my laptop screen with a blinking cursor where my name was to be typed. “Sir, we only need your name to verify it is you. And then we need you type in the amount we just sent you to verify it is your account. Sir? We have sent $250 to your bank account. Do not tell us your account number. Do not turn off your computer, sir.”

I envisioned a grinning felonious phone bank of cyber blaggards, every one a Nigerian Prince, in a basement in Albania, surrounded by mountains of sacks stuffed with scammed sucker cash, stacked to the ceiling. “Where are you calling from?”

“Santa Ana, sir.”

My phone told me the call originated from Carmel, New York. Thoughts stumbled around inside my head like Columbo at a mass shooting crime scene. What the Hell? It was the “PayPal” site. Wasn’t it? It was the “PayPal” “secure” SMS texting line. Were my eyes lying to me? I felt trapped. I was a hostage. They had invaded my laptop. They were inches away from my face. My immediate thought: I haven’t trimmed my old man nose hairs in days.

“We only need you to type your name and the amount, sir.” Sure you do, scumbag.

How did their programming code block get on my laptop? How did that happen? Argh. Where did my old desktop go? My beautiful screen display? My folders? My work?Everything had vanished. What if they never returned my laptop desktop back to me?

I thought of a “Hidden Brain” podcast episode I’d heard about a woman who was scammed by a “lover” she’d met online. It was called “When you need it to be true”. It began with, ”This week, we bring you two stories about how easy it can be to believe in a false reality — even when the facts don’t back us up.”  A gripping and horrifying exploration of the psychological manipulation of the scammed.

"Hidden Brain" podcast: "When you need it to be true"

I wondered what my adult daughter and son-in-law, both cyber security brainiacs, would be yelling at me to do right now. I could hear them. “Dad! What are you doing? How many times have we told you never to respond?”

1,987,344 times, to be exact. Including the day after “The Incident” when my son-in-law, Joe, texted me a YouTube video about a bank in Hong Kong scammed out of zillions by an AI generated deep fake zoom meeting. And then there’s this horror:

Argh. What to do? I typed in my name. “Now sir, very carefully, sir, type in the amount we sent you. Two-hundred and fifty dollars, sir”

Made no sense. I wanted my pretty desktop with all my blue folders back. I typed in a “$”. And then the “2”. And then the “50”. And then I typed in the period to denote two hundred and fifty dollars. At that moment the cursor skipped. Oh crap. Then the period vanished. I was stunned. Suddenly a comma appeared in its place, followed by three zeroes. The sum became $25,000.00. I felt a flood of emotions all at once. Confusion. Humiliation. Fury. Embarrassment. Alarm. Rage. The code block vanished and my familiar laptop field reappeared. Phew. Everything was as it was. My online banking site was open as I had left it (Mistake Number 324) and up on my screen.

“Oh, sir, you’ve made a terrible mistake.” His voice became panicked. Urgent.

Suddenly my constellation of emotions congealed into amusement. I pictured him accepting an Oscar for best performance as a leading scumbag in a scam. And lo and behold, there it was on my online banking site. These idiots had just sent me $25,000.00! Right there in my checking account. Ha. I calmly replied,“Sir, you made the mistake. How did you change the period I was typing into a comma followed by three zeroes?”

“Sir, you made the mistake. Why did you do that? Are you trying to steal from us, sir? I thought you were an honest man. Oh, now I’ll lose my job, sir. I’ll lose my job.”

I calmly said to the soon to be homeless Nigerian Prince,, “I’ll Zelle PayPal back all the money.”

“Oh, sir, you can’t do that. You’ll have to pay an 8% transaction tax. Are you willing to pay that tax, sir?“

Bullshit. “I’m going to my bank. I’ll tell them everything that happened. I’ve done nothing wrong here.” If it was PayPal’s error then screw PayPal for their incompetence. If it was a scam, which it was, I have got to freeze my accounts and extract the hackers from my computer immediately. My brick and mortar Chase bank was open and nearby. And one way or another I was heading there. Actually it’s made of brick and mortar and stucco.

Mistake Number Four

Where was this scam was going? I should have hung up but I didn’t. I had $25,000.00 in my account that wasn’t mine. “Do not tell you bank, sir. You’ll have to pay an 8% transaction tax. Do you have $2,000.00 to pay that tax penalty, sir? Are you trying to steal the money from us, sir? Do not do that, sir. Listen carefully, sir.”

I was silent. Epithets crowded my fevered brain.

“Sir, we can only accept cash.”

I know what I’ll do. I’ll play Batman and set up a sting. I calmly replied, “How would that work?”

“Are your banks close? Are you a senior citizen?”

“Yes.”

“So is my grandfather. Are you in a wheelchair, sir?”

“No.” I wanted to ask him if he was in a wheelchair and if his grandfather was proud of his scumbag grandson.

“Can you drive, sir?”

Silence.

“Sir, does your bank have many branches, sir? I want you to go to three different locations and withdraw cash from each bank so as to avoid the penalty tax. A PayPal representative will be at your door in 24-hours to accept the cash and give you a receipt.”

“You told me your offices were in Santa Ana.”

“He will have to fly to Tucson. He will arrive at your door on Monday, sir. He’ll have identification, sir. Let me ask you this, sir. Do you need to get dressed up to go to the banks, sir?”

Ellen looked at me. “Dressed up?” I was attired in breakfast appropriate semi-formal retiree wear. Gym pants. Stained T-shirt. Shoes. I looked like a cross between a Silver Alert and a homeless dumpster diver with Fred Flintstone stubble and Clem Kadiddlehopper hair.

I lied. “No, it will take me awhile to get ready..” I kept chatting with the scammer as I signaled to my wife that we should drive to our bank to freeze our accounts immediately. I picked up my open laptop, grabbed my car keys as quietly as I could, and gestured towards the front door. Together we slid into the front seat of our CRV and we raced up to our bank as I continue chatting with the scammer to keep him on the line.

Mistake Number Five

The bank was 2-minutes from our home. I forgot to fasten my seatbelt. The alarm bell dinged as I rounded the corner..

"Are you driving somewhere, sir? Are you driving to your bank sir? I thought you were an honest man, sir.”

“I’m driving to my bank. We can all discuss this with my bank manager.”

”Sir, I thought you were an honest man, sir.”

Up yours, you cold bucket of Gila monster spit.

First Smart Move

My open laptop under one arm, open phone in the other, looking scruffy as a Saturday morning we parked and leapt and rushed in and up to my familiar teller. With whispers and gestures we informed the teller something was up. She tapped on her keyboard, saw the $25,000 we described and told us to see the assistant bank manager, who was in view in her office. And then my sting fantasy collapsed. The scammer hung up. Damn. We rushed into her office and she froze all of our accounts saving us from a theft we could never afford, or anyone else could afford, for that matter. I felt as though I had been mugged in a dark alley and I had turned and run away just in time. I was shaken, trembling like Don Knotts jacked up on 12-cups of espresso.

Remember how delighted I was that those dumbasses had tossed $25,000 of their money into my account? Bank lady pointed out the $25,000 in our account was cobbled together from monies transferred from our other accounts. What? “The $25,000 was our own money. Damn. How in Hell did they do it?”

Bank Lady made a call. She restricted our accounts. She comforted us. Told us horror stories of online scams. “You’re not the only ones this month. Sadly common.”

Back at home I stared at my laptop like it was an open window through which bandits had crawled into our home in the middle of the morning. I cyber scrubbed it thoroughly.

I reported the scam online to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, (IC3), the nation's central hub for reporting cyber-crime.“It is run by the FBI, the lead federal agency for investigating cyber-crime. Here on our website, you can take two vital steps to protecting cyberspace and your own online security.”

Here’s the link: FBI IC3 to report an online scam

If reporting the scam is the first step what’s the second step? “Get educated about the latest and most harmful cyber threats and scams. By doing so, you will be better able to protect yourself, your family, and your place of work.”

I notified PayPal which was a huge pain in the ass because it took forever to find a link on their site where a customer could report a scam. And in this case a scam using their identity. Days later still no response. Screw PayPal. Screw the politics of their founder. I deleted my account.

Second Smart Move

I scrubbed my computers. I don’t recommend Brillo Pads. They’re hard on keyboards.

I was pleased to learn no viruses had gotten past my Malwarebytes virus detector. Great for Macs. Here’s the link: Malwarebytes

I immediately installed an additional virus detector. Just because. Who’s paranoid?

I then began the tedious chore of changing passwords and securing accounts and changing payment methods. Altogether it’s taken 3-days of keyboard tapping, watching my blood pressure and fantasizing about doing terrible things to terrible cyber crooks.

That Monday morning I returned to my bank to create new secure accounts and hand deliver flowers to my teller and the assistant bank manager. “Thanks for saving my behind.” Along with the smile, I got more reassurance I was not alone and more excellent tips.

My son-in-law texted me another link to a horror story. Of a Colorado couple scammed out of $137,000.00.

The day after our brush with a near loss of a small fortune I realized, in spite of feeling incredibly lucky, how traumatized I was by the experience. Surviving nearly being wiped out by virtue of my own witless actions was a jarring humiliation. Ellen and I could not imagine the grief, pain and trauma the victims of cyber vampires who lose their fortunes must feel.

When I told my cardiologist this week that perhaps that’s why my blood pressure was high this time around she sympathized. “It’s everywhere. Someone had targeted the female physicians here with an online scam. They are sophisticated. ”

Helpful Links:

FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center

The National Elder Fraud Hotline: Call 833–FRAUD–11 or 833–372–8311 every day from 6:00 a.m.–11:00 p.m. Eastern Time. English/Español/Other languages are available.

Pima Council on Aging Abuse & Exploitation

Hidden Brain Podcast: When you need it to be true