By Bonnie Brown

Columnist

 

A few nights ago, when I went into the bedroom to get ready for bed, I turned on the TV in there to listen to whatever program was on.  However, the screen said I needed to do a “member login.”  Whatever happened to merely clicking on the TV set and selecting the channel number?  

I asked for help from my human remote control, aka Tom, my husband.  He immediately set about providing the member login information, but it was not accepting the code.  Finally, he managed to connect, and we were set to watch the weather forecast and catch some of Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue.

The next afternoon, we turned on the TV set in the sunroom but were unable to find CBS on the screen.  Time to get some help and contact customer service.  We labored through the link provided on the screen.  We were told a technician would aid us with the problem.  

The technician seemed very competent and told us that our YouTube TV account had been compromised and there were several significant charges which necessitated his transferring our call to security.  We were connected with a gentleman who identified himself as “Peter Collins.”  

Tom asked where he was located and what his title was.  He sounded qualified to help us and set about asking us to review our accounts to see if there had been any unusual activity.  Tom did look through our accounts and apps but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.  

“Mr. Collins” confirmed through his information that there were pending international charges to our account amounting to more than $4,000. After more conversation, he advised us that someone had established a cryptocurrency account in the amount of $12,000 in Tom’s name at a location on Jackson Avenue.  

He told us that in order to “retrieve” the account in Tom’s name we would need to take $12,000 from our account and go to the location where the cryptocurrency account had been established and he would talk us through the transaction.  

Needless to say, we ended the call immediately and notified the Sheriff’s Office and contacted our bank.  Clearly, we were the target of a scam.  Thankfully, the bells went off in time to avoid the misery of being swindled.  

So, you think this is the end of the story?  Well, not quite.  Tom successfully deleted and reinstalled the YouTube app on our television sets.  That seemed to fix the problem of the difficulty of logging on to our TV provider.  

However, when he wanted to watch the Ole Miss baseball game, he discovered that he needed to log onto ESPN even though he’s had an account for quite a while.  When he entered the code provided on the screen, he was redirected to call a number for assistance.  When he called the number, the customer service representative answered and immediately asked for his credit card information.  End of that conversation.  

We can only conclude that the websites we accessed were fake, or we were redirected to a different link even though we consider ourselves to be very cautious when online.  So, check your bank accounts for fraud, check your credit reports, and remember how important it is to have strong passwords.  

There’re a lot of evil people out there who don’t need a gun to rob you.  Be aware!