This is a public service announcement from your friend/acquaintance up in Spokane, Washington.
I had arrived home from a trip last week to Las Vegas where I met with a lot of friends and I did not, I say it again, I did not lose one dime gambling.
However, when I did get home, I found that I had lost 2/3 of the amount of money I had in my checking/saving account to some dip crap/dick wad that had hacked into my checking account and took the money.
I don’t know exactly how they figured out how to get into my checking account unless it’s tied to the event a month or so ago where they got my mailing list from my AOL account and sent trash to all kinds of people.
The way they do it is they send a series of small deposits like $.25 or $.30 or $.42 or whatever and then they send a series of withdraws for the same amount to zero everything out. In my case it was like 20 of them, none of which I would’ve (but should’ve) noticed. Being gone for a week, I wasn’t into my electronic checking account and even if I would’ve been I would not have noticed it because generally I am only in my checking account to send electronic checks to pay my bills.
These deposits and withdrawals would not have changed my online balance materially enough for me to notice since I don’t particularly look at or didn’t use to anyway, in the past look at the daily transactions. I usually just go in and go to the bill paying feature and pay whatever bills that are due.
Well on Monday, having arrived back from Las Vegas I knew my American Express bill was due and I wanted to be sure I had remembered to pay it, so I went into my account and the bottom-line number was dramatically different by 2/3 and of course that got my attention. That’s when I started seeing all this activity but more importantly large amounts of money being removed from my account and sent to USAA and Schwab investment company.
I immediately went to my USAA account and noticed that there was no money coming in so that wasn’t real obviously and I don’t have a Schwab investment account.
I called my bank and they advised me to call an 800 number for their headquarters and I got a very nice young lady who was knowledgeable of this kind of thing and worked with me to get the bleeding to stop, but in order to keep it from being continued she had to terminate my account which effectively put me into a situation where I had $20 in my wallet and that was it. I couldn’t get the remaining money in my checking account.
The next day I had to go to the local bank and start a new account, however the fraud department from US Bank had in fact started a new account for me and transferred the remaining money into it and sent me a series of forms to fill out for each of the withdrawals to make a claim for fraud and obtain a provisional reimbursement of my money.
I have done that with help from the local bank and now I have spent an entire day + attempting to change my direct deposits from the Army, Social Security etc. over to the new account. Unless the bank can somehow recognize these direct deposits, it may be until after the first of the year before these new direct deposits take effect.
The bank will begin the process of trying to figure out who did this and, in the meantime, will give me back my money which is a great deal.
It is beyond belief how people spend time trying to screw you and take money or other things from you and if they spent a third of that time in gainful endeavors, they could probably be very successful. But they’re happier to do nefarious things that hurt people.
I think about some of the old people that live here at the Old Folks Home, who may only have Social Security income and what would happen to them if they lost 2/3 of any bank account they might have and not perhaps be as conversant with IT and that kind of stuff as I am.
I’m smart (or so I thought) and I got taken to the cleaners. So, the long and the short of this email is to check your electronic bank accounts or your other kind of bank accounts daily - pay close attention to things that may be happening to your account and if you don’t recognize something immediately call the bank or contact the bank somehow and get them involved.
I’m giving positive references to my bank U.S. Bank (local and national).
In fact, a month or two ago this happened to my USAA bank account
also, but for whatever reason I noticed that, and I called them, and we canceled all those potential small deposits and withdrawals before they could be acted upon.
A word to the wise - be constantly vigilant regarding your money (I thought I was, but guess I really wasn’t) Your livelihood is involved, and somebody will try to take it from you.
I’m very serious, they're out there folks, and they will take it from you in a heartbeat if you don’t watch. They did it to me AND they will do it to you
