A friend of mine was recently trapped by a Telus impersonation scam. I don’t know all the details, but suffice to say, the scammers violated her security and sense of safety, having accessed her bank accounts and credit cards.
I am amazed at the number of scams I receive via email and sometimes text in a day. Many doesn’t quite describe it; too many is more accurate. The effort that goes into creating these scams is considerable—the copied logos, the nearly identical email addresses, the timing.
I have a business account with Canada Post, and when I used it online to generate a shipping label, I was immediately deluged with emails for the next several days, advising that Canada Post requires payment of an insignificant amount and would I please enter my credit card information in the space provided.
That scam must come from inside Canada Post. I contacted them by letter, by email and by phone, and there wasn’t a hint of interest, not a single response of “Gee, I wonder, I’ll look into it.” Lately, there seem to be fewer. Perhaps someone was listening.
Falsified corporate logos were questionable early on with some of these scams, but they have tightened in similarity. The grammar and spelling were a dead giveaway then, but now that’s less obvious. I can’t help wondering why someone wouldn’t want to put this energy into something beneficial to society, like solving world hunger, climate change or how to get politicians to have a vision that exceeds their current term.
It’s human nature, I suppose; there are those individuals who, for whatever reason, prefer to walk the shady path, the challenge of deceit more appealing than integrity. It’s a similar mindset, I would think, to those individuals who toss their trash out of the window of their car while driving or those who abandon a mattress on the side of the road, the disposal then becoming someone else’s problem. Similar for sure.
There’s the recorded message advising that our credit card has been hacked or a warrant for our arrest has been issued. Sadly, there are worse scams that manage to trip us up, having us send money to bail out a grandchild wrongfully charged with a serious crime.
I think we become numb to the attacks of the scammers. They are so frequent and varied that we think of it as the price of a ticket for the convenience of having computer access to the world. But it begs the question—what else do we become numb to, what else do we accept without struggle or outrage?
The algorithms of social media target us with ads, but these same algorithms can also sift out the elderly and the vulnerable among us and use that information to do harm. Many years ago, an elderly neighbour of mine was scammed out of $30,000. She lived alone and had no children, and the loss of that amount of money was devastating for her. I recall that then there was little recourse for her.
My friend is struggling with the early symptoms of dementia. She is intelligent and cautious, but things got muddied in the Telus scenario, and she thought she was doing the wise thing. The solution seems so simple—assume everything is fraudulent. That feels no different than assuming everyone we meet on the street is a murderer. Social media has become a platform that can be abused and turned against us.
To ease my angst, I tuned into a movie with Jason Statham called The Beekeeper. I’m not suggesting that violence is the solution, but it did bring me some tongue-in-cheek relief. Adam Clay, the beekeeper played by Statham, tracked the individuals who stole money from an elderly friend of his who was the treasurer for a charity helping children. It’s one of those shoot-‘em-up films where the hero is never hit by a bullet and every weapon he aims is right on the money.
In this make-believe action film, Clay rid his part of the world of a network of scammers targeting the elderly, a network that led all the way to the White House. The world felt a little safer after Clay did his deed and then slipped below the surface of the ocean, his scuba gear handy, and vanished, his job of righting society finished for the moment.
