scam alert warning background to keep you save from online scam vector
BY LANA SCHWARTZ | lana.schwartz925@gmail.com
Saturday morning did not get off to a good start for me. For anyone squeamish among you reading this, please forgive me for the next sentence. My cat threw up in my bed. His eyes were bigger than his little cat stomach and he got too excited, ate too fast. It happens to the best of us. My cat, who is currently wearing a cone because of an ear infection that will not go away, got some throw up in his cone. Figuring out my exact order of operations was difficult. I had to clean up my bed, clean up my cat, take off his cone, and because, right now, if he has an ear he’s going to scratch it, put a different cone on him.
It was not a pretty scene, for many reasons, not all of which had to do with the throw up. Eventually, though, I got things settled. I threw my bedding in a bag to be taken to the dry cleaner. I got my cat into a soft cone (which he hated and did not hesitate to let me know) and then back into his plastic cone (which he does not like but seems to tolerate, like a relative you only see at holidays), when I got a call from TD Bank.
“Hello, is this Lana Schwartz speaking?” It was.
“Did you make a charge for $300 in Florida?” I had not.
“Did you make a withdrawal for $1,500 from an ATM in Florida?” I also had not done this.
My card had been skimmed, according to this caller from a number associated with TD Bank. Well, that’s exactly the sort of thing that would happen after the morning I had, I told myself.
He asked me some more questions, asked me to confirm some information. Halfway through our conversation, I walked into my bedroom and saw my cat had wriggled out of his cone.
“Are you still with me?” The TD Bank employee asked.
“I am, yes. There is just a lot going on right now,” I explained. “Can I speak to a supervisor?”
The TD Bank employee stressed the importance of me listening to him. He told me to open my TD Bank app, and pointed to the fact that it said they were “FDIC-Insured” as reason to believe everything would be credited back to my account.
He told me some numbers and asked me to put my debit card in an envelope, bring it outside to his supervisor, at which point it would be taken to an FDIC facility to be “unskimmed.”
As he gave me these instructions, I Googled “Can a scammer call you from the TD Bank phone number?” The answer, while unclear how or why, was yes.
It was at this point I reiterated my request to speak with a supervisor.
“Am I not doing a good job, Miss Lana?” The man, who I now understood not to be a TD Bank employee, wanted to know.
“Am I not doing a good job scamming you?” He might as well have been asking. Normally, I would’ve been even quicker on the uptake, but sometimes your cat throws up in your bed.
I could tell he was becoming increasingly agitated, desperate — two things TD Bank employees often are not, because the dollars and cents in your account may as well be Monopoly money to them. I imagine if you’re looking at numbers all day long, they begin to lose their significance, like leaves on various trees. In fact, the concern this “employee” had for alleged fraudulent activity on my account should’ve tipped me off in the first place. So I did what anyone has the free will to do, during any phone call: I hung up.
Immediately, I tried to call TD Bank, but since the number was the same as the one he was calling me from, the calls merged. I hung up again. TD Bank should really consider looking into this.
Eventually, I got through to TD Bank. I took care of my accounts how they needed to be. My bedding is still at the dry cleaners. My cat is in his cone.
While this event was exhausting and disconcerting, it is not without its takeaways: There is someone out there who believes I have enough money in my account to be worth stealing from.
Lana Schwartz is a writer who was born and raised in Queens and today lives in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared on The New Yorker, The Onion, McSweeney’s, and more. She is the author of the books “Build Your Own Romantic Comedy” and “Set Piece.”
