Yup—no Harbor Freight I’ve ever been to, nor is there any in our state but I get frequent emails purporting to be from them with my prizes.
A new one! Got a “confirm your dinner reservation” allegedly from the restaurant we frequent (not a chain). Except the format of their texts is different.
How many of you got this today? Our entire family all got it at different times. It was a photograph no clickable links…but do check out the Upper And lower Case nonsense And The Ridiculous Syntax (I wrote it that way on purpose) - how dumb do “they” think we are?
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You know, with Bank of America, it could be a scam or real. In this family, it gets sent to junk and deleted. Posters who have been around since 2010 will know why.
That’s very cryptic, @thumper1 . Details, please!
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It’s off topic so I sent you a message.
Let’s just say it took B of A 1 1/2 years to resolve fraudulent use charges in an account.
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Well my S’ (and mine) debit card with the fraudulent charge was the tip of the weird, PITA stuff last week. I had also gotten a security alert from Microsoft showing there was an unusual attempt at a logon, and I should recover my account. But it was for my VERY old verizon email address. It’s been defunct for many years, so I didn’t worry about it. But I did think maybe the kid’s Xbox account was still tied to it.
A few days later someone got into our Amazon Prime Video account. From what I can tell, all they did was make 2 new profiles with cryptic names “Youshoudlbemorecareful” and “Imloggingoutnow.” Oh my. I was not happy. And yeah, changed the password on that one.
A couple of days later, younger S tried to get on the Xbox, but it was logged out due to the security issue. But he had to recover the password… on an email account that doesn’t exist anymore and with security questions/passwords set up by kids over 15 years ago. Let’s just say I’m surprised we both still have hair. It took many hours to get it resolved, but it is done now - and tied to his email address.
And the debit card was closed, so that shouldn’t be a problem anymore. Please let that be it.
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It’s like those recorded messages that warn us that the IRS will “send the cops” if we do not call a certain number. As if the IRS would use the expression “send the cops”!
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If it were the 1940s and James Cagney was calling they might. 
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This just happened to my dear friend, luckily she didn’t send the $ - she almost did.
I am not asking anyone for money. So if you get a message from me asking for a couple of hundred. Its not me. I just got a call from my cousin asking for money. I saw her face and her lips moving. Then she messaged “Poor connection” and and asked me on messenger for $200, just for one day. I fell for it, because I had seen her face with her lips moving, so was sure it was her. Except her email was not the one I knew. So I did not send the money. She asked for pay-pall fb transfer or e-transfer Watch it my friends. They are getting smarter.
Whoa—that’s pretty awful and creepy!
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Unfortunately, scammers are now using AI to clone voices 
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With all the emphasis on phone and computer scams, there is still old- fashioned paper fraud. In Oct. I put out three checks in our mailbox for payment of utility bills (yes, I still did it via check). I put the flag up on my mailbox for the postman because our mailbox is on a post at the end of our longish driveway. The next month, I got three bills that were in arrears. I looked at our bank account and saw that the checks had been cashed. The kicker was that someone had added a name to the payee line in handwriting, and somehow these checks had been cashed. It wasn’t a life-changing amount of money and the bank made it right, but my raising of the mailbox flag was the reason the checks were stolen and altered. We had to make a report to the police in order to get reimbursement from the bank, which we did. But this incident is still not over because three people have been arrested and charged for check fraud and we have had to do Zoom court etc. There is another in-person hearing scheduled with public defenders when we are going to be on vacation later this summer. We contacted the court about the conflict but have heard nothing. Unless they subpoena us I guess we will skip it and the three who were involved will get off. We never laid eyes on them except in Zoom court. All of them are pathetic local underclass types in their early twenties with petty-crime priors. At this point I have nothing but pity toward them because they are really life’s losers. The bank should never have cashed these checks because the fraud was so transparent. The police told us to contact them if any of the three tried to contact us. That was not reassuring. At least electronic fraud is impersonal.
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Wow! That is freaky.
But a funny story, somehow it came up in conversation with younger S that you could put letters in your mailbox for the postman to take. He has NO idea. Why? I haven’t ever mailed anything from home in the kids’ lifetimes. My workplace has a blue USPS box - for 20 years it was even inside the building one floor below. Now I have to walk outside. But still, tons safer than the mailbox.
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Right, I don’t even use my mailbox anymore! I’ve transferred most of the bill paying to electronic and when I do have to mail a check, I go to the post office.
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We get a home water delivery from a company that does not have online bill payment. My husband sends a check every month and drops it inside the post office every month. Even then, someone whitewashed his check last year, wrote it out to themselves and changed the amount. My husband noticed right away when he checked his online banking that week. He reported it immediately and the bank reversed the charges and the fraud was evident. The bank was not really interested in pursuing the case against the person, so nothing came of it. We were just happy that we weren’t responsible for the charges. I also felt at the time that the bank should have noticed the obvious whitewash and not even honored the check.
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If/when I write a check (usually to the cleaning lady or hairdresser) I use an ultra-thin sharpie or uniball pen. They can’t be whitewashed. Of course someone could print checks with one’s checking account and routing info, but they can’t wash the check.
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We sometimes wonder who falls for those scams… here is a local story. Scary!!
A few months ago, a check we wrote and were mailing was stolen from our mailbox. I put a stop payment on it through Schwab, where we have all our accounts. One account is connected to Bank of New York Mellon, and it’s from that account that we write checks.
This past Friday, I got an email from Schwab saying our account didn’t have enough in it for a $20,000 transaction to clear. 
I called Schwab and they researched it and discovered that Yep, this was the check I had stopped. They said that even if we had had enough money in the account, it would not have been honored, because of the stop payment I had put on it. Thank goodness I did that!!
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We only put outgoing mail in the hands of our mail carrier or in the blue main post office box mounted in concrete at malls or deposit it into the mailbox at the post office. We never put outgoing mail in our mailbox—have read/heard of too many thefts.
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