…we find ourselves the second time in a single month the victims of debit card fraud. Charges appear in our checking account, purchases we did not make, for example, $842 to Papa John’s Pizza, $1,658 in a PayPal payment to some indeterminate entity in Great Britain, and other charges that were flagged and denied by our Credit Union. It’s all very disconcerting and maddening and the single most salient reason why I forgot to take my pills and then decided not to monitor my blood pressure this morning. I am loath to think of us as easy targets, but we could remember exactly the moment we were taken. Some email comes in a week or so ago that claims that we owe a toll fee. While our son has the other car in California, where there has indeed been at least one instance in which he was supposed to pay a toll and neglected to do so or something very much like that, the message seemed legitimate and the fee, a measly seven or eight bucks, seemed like a reasonable amount of money for such an infraction. So, thinking I was paying a fee to cover my boy’s backside while being encouraged to “take care of it” by my other half, I submitted a payment online. Didn’t get a receipt for that payment. In fact, the moment I submitted my sensitive information that screen just disappeared from my monitor. We were immediately suspicious and knew that it was only a matter of time. That time was this morning.
I am becoming rather trepidatious about the dangers to us at the hands of cyber fraud. Not a week goes by when some kind of dastardly attempt to separate us from our money is not detected somewhere. It used to be just the Nigerian prince guy in an email, but now that guy has proliferated to such a degree, that he’s ubiquitous, and he’s developed new skills. He’s on Facebook Marketplace, he’s using your friend’s profile as an imposter and sending you a direct message, he’s on Craigslist, he’s still sending you emails, he pretends to be Netflix, he pretends to be Amazon, he pretends to be anyone you do business with on the regular, threatening you, claiming you haven’t paid, or claiming that your card isn’t working or that some other minor thing needs immediate attention. Holy shit. If we were indeed easy targets we’d be on the streets by now. But every once in a while, sadly, twice in one month, some sneaky shit gets by us. It’s enough to make one paranoid. It’s enough to turn one into a luddite. Can you imagine, in this day and age, having the guts and commitment and high enough anxiety to completely withdraw from the digital world? It would be practically impossible. To swear off all online purchases, all direct payments, all subscriptions, to completely unplug? I can’t imagine this. We can be vigilant. We are savvy. And yet both times we were victimized, the whole thing was so fast and stupidly simple–just some message coming through, reasonable, understandable, likely, credible, and we’re like, yeah, let me just take care of that right now. In a split second of not thinking too deeply about what you’re doing, boom, someone has your card number! I think about all the businesses out there that have my card number! What’s stopping them from taking me to the cleaners–or inadvertently leaking my data to some malevolent bad actor? I don’t want to think about this any more. I need a drink.
And then, against my better judgement, against my will, I cannot help but think of our new and current commander in chief. This guy is the absolute King of the Grift and just over half the population (of Americans who voted, anyway) chose this guy to run the country again after an abject failure the first time. And then finally, I think about how the life is reflected in the art: Adam and I just wrote a new song called “Neo Primeval,” and the lyric in the chorus is this simple and damning sentence repeated twice over: “It doesn’t look good for us. No, it doesn’t look good for us.” I can only hope to be wrong about this.
michael jarmer 