It feels, in these post-truth times, as though a lot of us are just one little text message away from being scammed. By a lot of us, I mean you not me. I’m no sucker. I laugh in the face of the scammerati. Or at least I used to think I did.
It’s not that the phishers and the fakers and the phoneys haven’t tried to trick me in the past few years. Let me count the ways. There have been several of the – by now a classic of the genre – texts purporting to be from the eFlow toll operator. These never came close to conning me because the scammers, as clued in as they often are, don’t seem to be aware that I cannot drive.
There’s the scam where the perpetrators pretend to be your teenage relative who is frantically texting because they lost their phone and need you to send money to replace the mobile. This one is also ineffective because in my case the fake daughter begging for help (“pls mum, now!!!!!!”) used far too many exclamation marks. While I can’t seem to do anything about their preference for floordrobes as opposed to hanging clothes on actual hangers, I have successfully trained my children to use restraint in that area. Try that one on someone else you dirty scammer!!!!!
There’s the one pretending to be from An Post, a brief but pointed message about a parcel I need to pay for and collect. I’m too lazy to collect parcels so this one doesn’t work either. Unscammable, that’s me. Or so I thought.
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It was a text message purporting to be from Revolut that got me in the end. The message contained an eye-catching query about whether I had in fact bought a certain item from a certain online retailer or whether the €17.99 that had left my account was a fraudulent payment. I checked my Revolut app and discovered I hadn’t bought anything from that online retailer recently. Would I ring the number in the seemingly innocuous text message to figure it out? I would of course.
It turns out I don’t laugh in the face of the scamming community. I swear blind at them. Some of the language coming out of my mouth was so disgusting I shocked myself but I kept going
The man who answered the phone sounded friendly and reassuring. I was not to worry, he was going to help. I told him I’d checked on my Revolut app and there was no sign of a payment to the online retailer, and he told me that was part of the fraudster’s ploy but he would sort it all out for me. He told me to download another app and then input my details. It would be all fixed in a few minutes. I told him that I’d downloaded the app, then he asked me to input my bank card details. I got out my bank card and had typed in the first few numbers when something about the man’s tone, a sort of impatient, nervous note, stopped me in my tracks. “How do I know you are from Revolut?” I asked him at which point the impatient voice turned peevish and I realised what was happening. I was being scammed.
It turns out I don’t laugh in the face of the scamming community. I swear blind at them. Some of the language coming out of my mouth was so disgusting I shocked myself but I kept going. I was livid with the man on the phone, outraged that he had targeted me, raging that I’d almost fallen for it. I swore at him until I had no more curse words left in my repertoire, ending the call with a final string of expletives and blocking the number. They’re persistent, I’ll give them that. We did a sort of scammer/scammed paso doble for a while: a different scammer rang back from another number. I answered and cursed them out of it. I blocked the number again. Another scammer rang back. Each time I effed and blinded at them, threatening to call the police. Eventually, they got fed up with my verbal abuse and stopped calling.
Not long afterwards I heard a whole segment on RTÉ’s Liveline about this exact scam. I only use Revolut for petty cash needs and for bribing my children (those floordrobes won’t clear themselves) but in some cases the unfortunate people calling Joe Duffy had lost thousands. I listened and thought about my lucky escape.
Last week a friend was scammed, her Instagram and Facebook and Etsy accounts, from which she runs a business, were taken over by hackers. She’d been hoodwinked out of her passwords by a text message that came from someone she thought she knew. (The scammers had texted from an acquaintance’s number having infiltrated my friend’s contacts.) She eventually managed to get her accounts back with the help of tech-savvy relatives, but it was a frustrating, exhausting and emotionally disturbing episode during which the hackers attempted to extract money from her. She swore a lot at them on the phone too. It appears to be a common response.
I thought I was unscammable. I was wrong. Here’s some of what I learned from the unpleasant experience: don’t respond to any of these messages however plausible they seem. Contact all organisations directly by phone or through their own apps. Never download any external apps (what, I wonder now, was I thinking?). Don’t share your account information or passwords with anybody, even people you think you know.
Do curse loudly and often at anybody who tries to scam you. It’s cathartic and if nothing else will hopefully wreck their heads as much as they’ve wrecked yours.