the daily snivel

  Rob's adventures in identity theft:

Holy cats!

I got a call today from the bank that has seen fit to issue me a credit card, asking me to verify a charge for $8000 that had been made by a mail-order company somewhere in the United States. I've rarely made a funnier face than the one that crossed my mug when I heard that request, and I kind of wish you'd been there to see it. The moment was unique, and (hopefully) now one that hopefully has been relegated to the past.

I immediately had the card cancelled and destroyed it. Ever since then, I've been picking my brains trying to figure out the last time I used my card, and how someone else might have gotten the number. I can't remember purchasing anything on-line with it, or even going out to dinner and paying for the meal. Nothing on my last statement suggests anything suspicious -- in fact, I've barely used it at all since the Spring, mainly because I was extremely poor until I started working, and tended to hover around the limit.

The most disturbing possibility emergest out of an unfortunate blunder I made last weekend. It was a Friday, around 6pm, I was in the office by myself, and I was getting ready to go home. After picking up my bicycle from the shop (it had a broken spoke), I returned to work to change out of my work clothes and into a comfortable t-shirt and cycling shorts for the ride home. It was late; I was tired. I emptied the pockets of my slacks and went to the washroom to change. Then I packed up the rest of my things and cycled home.

That is, I packed up the rest of my things except for my wallet. It lay, forgotten, on top of my desk; a stupid mistake that I'd made in the numbskullery of a late afternoon without coffee. I hadn't realized this until I made it home and intended to go out and see my friend Celeste, and by that point it was much too late to go back for it. The building gets locked up over the weekends, and I only have key to our office door. So, all I could do is hope that it would be safely waiting for me when I returned on Monday morning.

Now, implicit in that hope is the hope that no one like cleaning staff would, say, come in over the weekend, grab my wallet, and copy down my credit card numbers. But apparently something like this may have happened. It's very difficult to say for sure. Still, here we do have a mysterious charge to my card for quite a lot of money, and no other explanation for how the number got out into the world. I'm normally very, very careful with my credit card information, and I was furious with myself for leaving my wallet behind at work.
Anyway, I've since had to cancel my other card, because I don't want to take the chance that it was compromised as well. I'm hoping -- really, really hoping, that this is the end of the dodginess and fraud. On the bright side, I'm so poor that no one's going to be able to steal much from me anyway.

I guess the moral is: It Could Happen To You.

 

 

This is one of those rare links I have to share. So, yes, I've become one of those obnoxious Macintosh people. And, yes, I'm excited about the iTunes Music Store, which is one of the first genuinely workable downloadable music retail concepts ever implemented. I'm a law student, and I have a cheap 56k dialup connection, so I don't download illegal music, unless, perhaps, it's merely "never recorded bootleg" illegal, and has never been digitally encoded on the underside of a CD by the starving artist in question. The iTunes store is presently available only in the US, and only for Macintosh users, but apparently it's going global and Windows friendly in the next month or two, as soon as iTunes 4 is ported to Windows.

Anyways, the point is that it's about time we had proper, legal, downloadable music for sale. The music industry has alienated scores of customers by first dragging its heels on on-line music purchasing, and then having the gall to sue students, grandparents, anybody, for sharing so much as one song on-line. On the other hand, sticky music retailing models are little better. Recently, Buymusic.com went on-line, and quickly made a shill of itself by offering music ONLY in WMA format, ONLY for Windows Internet Explorer users, and at widely varying prices with widely varying use restrictions. They have no plans to expand the service or the concept, and even redirect the users of other browsers and platforms to a cheerful "you're using the wrong browser/platform" page. Which, as you've read before in my various rants, is something that annoys me to no end. Standards, people. Standards. Accordingly, someone with too much time and too much vitriol has whipped up http://www.dontbuymusic.com/, which I stumbled across today. I try not to take sides in these sorts of things, but it actually made me laugh out loud. At work. Where I certainly shouldn't have been doing anything of the sort.

Also, I absolutely insist that you give a listen to some of the music by Brad Sucks. Especially his amazing song "Making me nervous," officially my favourite song of the week. It's free, legal, and nifty. Brad is also known as the Mad Hatter, genius behind The Fantastic Life and Suicide of Mr. Mary Holiday, whose exploits you can read of in my links section.