Manducate Monday

manducate ~ to chew or eat

I have a cautionary tale for you today that doesn’t show me in a good light, but it does have a happy(ish) ending.

Saturday night after dinner, I fired up my lap top intending to do some editing. Naturally I didn’t just dive right into work, I had to check my email first. There was a message from one of my sisters – not unheard of, although she usually emails me in the morning, not the evening.

Anyway, the reason she was emailing was because she needed a favour. She was trying to purchase a gift card on Amazon to give to a friend for her birthday, but her credit card wasn’t being accepted. Could I do her a favour and make the purchase for her and she’d pay me back when she got her credit card straightened out.

There were a number of things that should have tipped me off that this wasn’t on the up and up. To name just a few:

Why would my sister email me instead of texting me?
It’s unlikely she’d send a gift card via email
It’s really unlikely she’d spend $100 on a gift card for a friend
And why wouldn’t she just use her hubby’s credit card instead?

In my defense, I was tired and not thinking clearly, and while the request seemed a little unusual, it didn’t raise any alarms with me. So I logged into my Amazon account, ordered up the gift card, and sent it off. I even sent her a copy of the receipt.

Then I logged into Facebook where one of the first messages I saw on my feed was from a cousin who warned us that my sister’s email account had been hacked.

O. M. G.

I immediately phoned Amazon support and they were pretty damn amazing. They’d already flagged the activity as suspicious and temporarily suspended my account. To my relief, the purchase hadn’t gone through. They sent me an email confirming what was going on and followed up with a phone call letting me know I’d have to reset my password and any other account information.

I don’t make purchases with that account very often and my credit card information was out of date, so when I placed the order I had to fill that in again. After I finished straightening things out with Amazon I called my credit card company, just in case. A purchase from Amazon had been attempted but it didn’t go through, and they suggested I keep an eye on my account for the next couple of days. If I see any activity I haven’t authorized I need to call them immediately.

So when all is said and done, I got off lucky, thanks to being able to take action so quickly. Other than the embarrassment of being gullible, the only fallout from all of this was having to reset my Amazon account. I resent the password for my email as well, just in case.

It happened to me; it could happen to you; it could happen to anyone.

Be safe out there in cyberspace.