Ah, The Joys of Legacy Banking and the Attendant Scams!
For better or for worse we still live in the world where we have to — at least to some degree — interface with legacy finance and banking.
To that end, I still have a couple of credit card accounts, which are more or less essential if you have to function in a world where you still have to rent cars, and reserve hotel rooms and such things. I'm okay with that.
Welcome to Stupidville!
But sometimes I just want to slam my head against the wall.
So, today is the due date on my Chase Visa card, so I went to use their online system to pay my bill. Sure, I could have auto-pay, but since I sometimes make payments and sometimes pay the whole balance it's just easier to go online and pay, each month.
Allegedy...
I start logging in, and then I get the little message that says "we don't recognize the device you're logging in from, so we need to verify that you are really you so we're going to call, text or email you with a code. Please choose your contact method."
Which is all fine and good until I realize that my choices are a phone number that I have not had in 17 years, and an email address that has been inactive for at least a decade.
I do recognize them, though, as the last numbers and email address I had when I lived in Texas... from where I permanently moved in 2006.
This situation is particularly annoying because last month — when I was making some changes to my account — I ended up having to go through the same process and we went to great lengths (with a with a customer service specialist on the phone while I did it) to change my log-in information. And here we are again!
Yes, I did have a Chase account back then... but it was closed almost 20 years ago. WHY they system would default to the oldest archived information rather than the most recently updated is a mystery to me!
Not having a spare hour on my hands to get on the phone again, I decided to instead go through the laborious process of making a one-time payment-by-phone from my checking account.
Meanwhile, Down at the Bank...
I think I may have been done with that process for all of 25 minutes when there was a phone call from my bank.
In this case, it is my local bank and I have to admit that I actually like them because they are a small regional bank, not some giant multinational conglomerate and — hard as it may be to believe this — they actually know me as a human being and I can talk to real people there!
Oh, and they have been in business since 1908, essentially under the same ownership...
That said, this was a call from our local branch manager wanting to know if I had authorized a charge of $1,411 to some "Taiwan high speed rail ticketing network." Which, of course, I had not.
This was instead somebody trying to use my information to scam me out of some ching. Which is an alarmingly common occurrence, in this day and age.
What I find both amazing and disturbing is the sheer number of these kinds of spam/phishing attempts I encounter on a daily basis. I probably get two or three pieces of "phone spam" and two or three pieces of email spam daily, typically about some card or account of mine that's about to be charged by PayPal/Amazon/Best Buy and "please to call this number if you didn't make the charge."
Which basically just preys on people being too stupid, or busy, or both to pay attention... and instead react with anxiety, rather than think things through.
In this case, I was definitely both relieved and grateful to be banking at a decent institution, and the charges and the card were canceled immediately and I am liable for nothing... and I'm actually going to be able to go to the local branch later today and pick up a new debit card which they can create there, on the spot. No having to wait "10-14 business days" to have a new card mailed... or get it next day for a $30 express mail fee.
Suffice it to say that sometimes I just get really tired of this world of ours...
Thanks for reading, and have a great 4th of July!
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Created at 2023.07.03 15:15:10 PDT
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I spent 2 hours and 37 minutes on the phone with my old bank trying to get 4 pieces of paper from them yesterday. This is one reason I left them. I managed to get 3 of the 4, but they were not allowed to send the 4th digitally due to my husband's name on first on the account, even though it is closed. So I must wait for it to come via mail.
This bank, USAA Savings, used to have world class customer service. That changed for some reason about 10 years ago, and I'd had enough of their shenanigans 2 years ago and closed all the accounts.
But alas, due to another bureaucracy, I had to contact them again...
Interesting... and very sad. When I lived in Texas I actually lived close to the giant USAA building, and it seemed like everyone used them for everything from insurance to banking... and raved about them. Once upon a time Wells Fargo was the same, but their service has also been replaced by DISservice.
Good looking. NEVER just respond to such outdated information laden emails. Always call and handle the matter with the relevant institution, so that you cannot be phished. IIRC, you can be malwared just by opening an attachment or clicking a link. I could be hopelessly outdated and just opening an email could succeed in uploading malware onto your system, but there's little you can do about that if you actually use email.
What you can do is to not respond to such emails at all, and just call the institution or manually type in their URL to contact the institution, ensuring your contact is with that institution, and not malicious Hax0rz.
Thanks!