HOW A LITTLE STUPIDITY BECOMES A MAJOR PAIN IN THE ASS

I have been getting junk phone calls to my house phone for years and I do not even bother to answer – I just let it ring. However, I am beginning to get these type calls on my cell phone. About a month ago I answered a call on my cellphone I suspected was junk call. I answered for reasons which escape me now. It was a call to inform me that the company making the call was contracted to make refunds to former customers of a company that I used to use to perform maintenance and repairs to my computer. In order to do so, I had allowed the company technician to access my computer. I never had a problem in doing so. My relationship with the company ended when they went into bankruptcy. This all happened several years ago. The call seemed legitimate but I was very wary. It did seem odd they wanted access to my computer to give me a refund. Anyway, to make a long story shorter, I let the caller take control of my computer. (This was HUGE mistake!) The caller quickly made it appear that I owed him $10,000 and he demanded that I pay him immediately by withdrawing $10,000 in cash and send it to him with a money order I was to purchase. The person in control of my computer was very good at confusing and distracting me.  I came to my senses about this time and turned off my computer. My computer is password protected and when I rebooted, my password no longer worked. I had been had! I got on the telephone and reported the whole episode to the Police and the fraud department of the bank. The fraud people quickly assured me I had not suffered any monetary loss but I would be required to change all my bank accounts and have my computer ‘cleaned’ and certified as ‘cleaned’ before I would be allowed to use it for online banking. This was the start of my major pain in the ass. The police report went nowhere because the ‘crime’ could be properly categorized.

I arranged to have the computer ‘cleaned’ and the technicians assured me I would not lose any of my data files but my computer would be in the same state as a new one. All my files would be on an external hard drive that I purchased for that purpose. I would have to ‘build’ my computer from scratch. I was allowed to use my computer for banking business after I sent the work invoice to the bank’s fraud department. I have been slowly rebuilding my computer since it was certified as being ‘clean’. It is a process that has some positive aspects. Some of my do overs incorporate ‘lessons learned’ and are better than before. It is still largely a pain in the ass for me, however. New bank account numbers means that I have to change all of my direct deposits and get new checks. Another pain in the ass several time over.

I cannot complain too much as I basically did it to my self. I am motivated to not do it again but one never knows.