by I, like a lot of people, don’t use email very often these days. I check it maybe every other day, and barely just glance at it. My primary communications occur through a Signal, SMS text, and various Discords. Hell, I probably use LinkedIn messaging more than I use email these days.
But I did happen to check my email tonight and this caught my eye:
Excuse me, what? At first, I thought it was some weird phishing attempt. But I logged into my Paypal account and verified it was legit. Now, let’s take a look at the multiple levels of bonkers.
- $600 is not a small amount of money, which is important given the following bullet points.
- I had to contact them today in order to head off this $600 disaster.
- Today lasted until 9pm. I only found the email 8:03pm and can see the email was sent after 3pm.
I thought, there’s absolutely no way a serious company actually operates like this. But I looked at the web site. I looked at the SSL cert. I did this. I did that. I was not getting phished. This was real. So I called the number.
The next thing you know I’ve got a guy on the other side of the planet picking up the phone. He sounds like he’s in a tin can. I can hear multiple people in the background speaking. He starts reading off a script. I thought, no, no, no, no. This is fake. It has to be. Nope, I did all the checks again. Absolutely real. But I couldn’t but think the whole time, don’t give him any information that can be used to commit fraud against me, despite staring at the $600 notice and Chrome’s validation of the SSL cert.
I worked my way through a conversation for a few minutes and assured him I did not lend my account to anyone, and this was fraud, and the transaction needed to be canceled. He did so, but good lord, me being separated from $600 was this guy and about 55 minutes on the clock.
Wow.
This is obviously absolutely crazy, but there’s possibly a larger issue at work here. Have you noticed things with various Big Tech firms just aren’t working as well as they used to? I think we all know Google’s search engine doesn’t exactly work anymore. That’s a huge one. But I keep having these little interactions like this and something just seems … off.
I hear a lot about supply chains and labor shortages and such, and I do wonder how this is impacting tech beyond wages. I think I’m getting a sense that cracks are starting to appear in some of these systems and companies after some of these interactions and observations. Be careful with your money and personal details, folks. I have no idea what insanity I’m going to see next after this one.
