Today I received an email from PayPal about my account.
I don’t have a PayPal account.
Uh Oh.
We haven’t known each other long, you and I, so you wouldn’t know that I have been teased in the past about my latent Nancy Drew investigative tendencies. I have been known to participate in sorting through suspicions and lining up clues to come to conclusions. Generally, these conclusions end with my leaving a passive aggressive note in the office kitchen that says “The vanilla biscotti coffee creme in the fridge is actually NOT yours to enjoy. I’m talking to you, Beth.”
I have a strong sense of justice. If I see injustice played out in my little world, I dig to find out the who, what and where. I would have made a good journalist, had it not been for my dislike of crowds, travel, small tape recorders and fedoras. So instead, I am a self trained, self proclaimed investigator who knows her way around Google.
I like to know as much as I can about most things that cross my line of sight. I am the curious Pomeranian sitting on the back of the couch all day, watching out the window to make sure the world is going as it should. To the untrained eye, this might read as my being nosey. Like Gladys Kravitz with the curtains pulled back, judging you all. That’s not really the case, although I have also made up detailed stories in my head about every one of my neighbours.
Back to the PayPal email this morning. It was to confirm a purchase on Facebook of $9.99 for Farmville. If I did not make this purchase, I was instructed to click on the link to confirm my account. I know it was a scam, but I poked around the email a little more to see just what kind of jiggery-pokery (thank you Justice Scalia!) I was dealing with. In a quick look in and around the email, I confirmed the following…
1 – PayPal was not the sender. Duh. The sender was someone named Kerry from a dot com email address
2 – I don’t have a PayPal account, so no need to check in.
3 – I don’t play FarmVille because I’m not a serial killer.
4 – I found the IP address of the sender imbedded in the email.
If there is anything the Internet makes me increasingly angry about, it’s the endemic rise of scams, and the landscape of depravity that is the YouTube comments section. Both proving to be an affliction of binary proportions. What the Internet makes me increasingly happy about, however, is the availability of incredible search engines and capabilities, and videos of hedgehogs eating fruit.
After some vigilante-styled thinking about my recourse on this nameless embodiment of trickery, I decided I could only really fight fire with fire. And spam.
Kerry from the Global-something dot com email address will be experiencing the unbridled joy of the following email subscriptions:
* American Girl doll fan club
* Kroeger weekly coupons
* Target weekly coupons
* Monthly newsletter on toilet training and bed-wetting issues.
* Katy Perry fan club
* Email sign up for a weekly newsletter about upcoming shows at strip clubs in your area (which the IP address says is Providence, Utah)
* Proctor and Gamble weekly coupons
* Positive Vibe of the Day – a daily email of positive self talking points
* An arrangement for the Mormon Church to contact “Kerry” about Jesus.
Of all of those, I feel the best about the Mormon Church intervention. I might not be big on religion in general, but if your life has come to a crossroad of having to scam strangers out of their money, maybe a little Jesus wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen to you.
It’s your move, Kerry.
