Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Just up in India, stealing your cash.

The worst way to wake up on a Sunday morning is undoubtedly by getting a 7:00 a.m. complimentary wake-up call from American Express to ask you if you just spend 1,500 rupees at a cosmetics store in Delhi. 

If we're looking for bright side here, maybe it's that I've never felt so instantly awake that early on a weekend morning.

I went through my mental checklist: card has never left my possession, never written the number down, never said it out loud in a public place, haven't ordered anything from sketchybiz.com. 

And this whole time at the back of my mind I'm remembering those hilarious identity theft commercials from a few years back where they'd show a wizened old man sitting in a Lazy boy, smoking a cigarette, but when he opened his mouth he sounded like a teenage valley girl discussing the merits of a recently purchased bustier. 

Sort of like that time in college when someone in Moscow got a hold of my bank account information and started withdrawing my money in $250.00 increments from various ATMs around the city.  After the initial shock wore off and the I'd survived the crazed visit to the bank to verify that I had not been in Moscow in the last 10 days, I may or may not have spent the day breaking into a Vladimir-inspired accent and mentioning the expensive Vodka I was purchasing with that cold, hard, American cash.

4 comments:

  1. I got a 3:00 am phone call this morning (that I didn't answer). When I listened to the voicemail this morning, it told me that my JP Morgan Chase Mastercard was locked for security reasons. Joke's on JP Morgan Chase because I don't even have a JP Morgan Chase Mastercard (or account for that matter).

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    1. Hahahah. Hopefully they reached whoever really owns the card...whoops on their part!

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  2. Woah. You have some serious luck getting struck by the identity thieves (because of course they are all in cahoots) twice in a decade. Maybe you better start hiding your money under your mattress. P.S. I had no idea that cosmetic stands in India could accept American Express. Seriously though, that is really scary and I'm sorry it's happened to you.

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    1. Seriously. I'm not quite sure how it happens. I am convinced they're all in cahoots, too!

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