A Close Shave

I almost fell prey to a scam today.

The morning was hectic. We were emerging (or so I thought, optimistically) from a weekend plus two of high fevers and snot. The technicians (four? I lost count) had arrived to re-gut our apartment to fix a persistent leak in our air-conditioning. They were roaming about, laying plastic sheeting over the whole house. I was with my son, blinds drawn, him falling in and out of sleep. The phone buzzed. I thought it might have had something to do with work (although I was on leave) and picked up. My first mistake.

An accented voice spoke my name – incantation of access. This was a real human. She claimed to be from a bank that I had accounts with, and that they had noticed a suspicious transaction on one of my cards and were intending to block it. But to do so, she went on, they needed verification.

The tingle of uncertainty fizzled from the soles of my feet, my fingers. Heavy breaths, sunken stomach (heavy and yet not there). My son was crying in his room, bawling that I was not giving him attention. The technicians were hustling. My other child had just woken up and was stumbling about.

It could be a scam, I thought. But in the split second, compounding the fear of the unauthorised transaction, the weight of also trying to determine if this call was a scam was too much. In the haze – son screaming, fear mounting, technicians bustling – I said something I maybe should’nt have. Even as I did so, I recalled learning how environmental factors could make a person more susceptible to scams (that knowledge was of little use in the moment). But when I pressed further about which card the transaction was being charged to, she gave me card details that were not mine. I said that I had no such card, and she said that she would get the credit card department to look into it, and hung up.

The entire call seemed legitimate, but I was afraid. Living in this scam age would do that to you (perhaps the trouble was that I was not as suspicious as I should have been). I checked with the bank and had my fears confirmed – the number was not theirs. The representative said that they would follow up internally. But at least I had not disclosed any passwords or credentials.

Perhaps I had survived the worst of it – no money seemed to zip out of any tear. But this cast a shadow over the rest of the day. I fretted over whether the combination of information that they had (my name, phone number and now, identification number) could be weaponised. I tried to make light of it, joked with my wife. I was humbled (rightly so). The shame, the fear.

The scammers called back that afternoon. A different voice over a different number, claiming to be following up on the morning’s call, to have more information about an unauthorised registration of a credit card in my name. This time, I hung up and checked with the bank (fool me once!). The bank confirmed again that this was not their number. In the moment, the lines blurred. I checked the number I was calling again – were the first callers the real bank and this man on the call the scammer? I triple-checked the number I had dialed. Was this all an elaborate ruse? A vortex of meaninglessness invited me in for a dip.

The bank’s representative offered to cancel my cards and banking facilities. After a moment’s hesitation (oh, the inconvenience!), I agreed – to think that convenience (the root of all this) would have tried to seduce me again.

Fear and self-loathing in scam land (this is a scammer’s world and we’re just living in it). What could they do, now that they had my name, phone number and identification? What else did they know about me? My email? My address? The many sign-ups and loyalty programs, once-registered, never-used, ready pickings on the dark web.

We are leaky ships, pouring data out of every orifice. Anybody/everybody could/would/will scoop up this data and use them against us. My email address strewn carelessly across the web like scat. My phone number and name leaked by some company or other (well-meaning, maybe, often not). And we are just cartoon ducks plugging ever-emerging holes with our thumbs and toes. Even if I tried to be more careful now, what about the data that was already out there? How would I ever disassociate my name from my phone number? What if the calls weren’t aiming at getting money, but more data – confirmation that this number belonged to me, confirmation that I used this bank, any details that they could elicit from the conversation?

Everywhere we turn, our technology is increasingly an adversarial environment – we fight to discern truth from lies (scam or not, AI-generated or not, misinformation or not), to preserve our attention (dopamine loops everywhere, dark patterns stalking), to find community and connection (over alienation and commodification). It is all along a single spectrum – scams, ads, slop, misinformation, addiction. Not an inevitability, I’d like to think, but it serves us good to be clear-eyed about this.

And so, I just remain thankful for now that no lasting harm was done. But the risk of an even more sophisticated attack down the line remains, always lurking, always threatening.