Now How do I Describe This Scam?

I wouldn't have discovered this attempt if I hadn't just previously discovered that all kinds of welcomed email was being shuttled into my Spam folder. There were about two hours worth of emails to go through... before I quit trying. And the reason for that was I had to try to verify without responding to the wannabe scam that it was in fact a scam.

That meant, first, a very brief look at what it was about. This one was trying to persuade me that I had signed up for an ongoing withdrawal of over $600..... unless I called their 800 number to change my mind.... and meanwhile they were thanking me for my first payment of that amount.

Now I don't know about your finances, but that is certainly an amount to get my attention! It's supposed to, since that's their way of fleecing the sheep, when we reach back to them to stop a "terrible problem". I was sure I didn't believe I'd signed up for that kind of deduction. Nor could I recall anything I'd bought in the last several months being that amount. I had to check, however.

First, check out the email without clicking on anything to see what telltales or other information I could get. There was no real name to the "bill". There was no explanation of what the alleged payment had been for, just a hyphenated number/letter combo for the description, as if it came out of a catalog. First thing therefore was to log out of my laptop, shut down, wait, then log back in. I checked my credit union for the last 2 months plus, and nothing similar there. Then I tried my credit card company... and hit a snag.

I couldn't get in. It claimed to be opened but I got a blank page. I tried a couple more times, and decided that given the lateness of the hour I'd try the next morning. Perhaps they were down for some reason, like my credit union had been after hours for the last couple of days. I presumed weekend re-programming of some sort, the kind of thing that they'd probably not advertise to us customers for fighting cyber attacks. (For the credit union, they had a lot of reprogramming to do to complete a merger with another credit union, which they'd been announcing for weeks. They were up and down, but currently up.)

This morning I couldn't get in before work, but once home I got in without problems. As expected, my outstanding balance is zero, having paid it off for the month a few days earlier.  Checking back a couple months, again no amount on the books resembling the stated payment the scammers pretended to be grateful for.

One more thing left to do. Back to my email, deleting all the spam mails, whether or not they were actual spam. (Sorry if I lost your email, anybody.) Then I emptied the trash, and shut the laptop down again. After a reboot my email would come up with only the new stuff on it. After checking those, I dipped into the spam folder, and nothing new had gone into it. I can hope the program learned that the emails I sent back to "not spam" will be treated as such when they come in from that source in the future, as most of them are from a much favored site where we have an email community and write back and forth. 

Those weren't all the mis-marked spam emails, however. I had to tell a family member that I hadn't responded to her waited-for email because it never occurred to me after so many years that the spam folder would snatch up her mail. Mostly these days it's supposed to hold unwanted vendor solicitations, once I'm done with an order from the company and mark them for spam, and political solicitations I'm deluged with from people I can't afford to support and can't or definitely won't vote for, like a former AZ representative.

Regardless of whether my spam folder learned its lessons, I certainly did. I will be checking it regularly to see what's going astray. To any friends who read this, if I've been ignoring you lately, you've popped into my Spam folder. Try me again. I'll be checking.

I also won't be "cancelling" a debt I never took on, since I am sure it's just their way of getting financial information from me. There may well be a sucker born every minute, but it wasn't me for that particular minute.