Scammed Into Silence

Being conned is humiliating; scammers count on that.

Yesterday morning I got an email telling me a subscription I didn’t know I had was going to auto-renew if I didn’t cancel it. I didn’t want the subscription, and it was expensive, so I figured I should try to cancel it.

This was a major error. I called the number, and the various voices on the other end proceeded to try to get me to give them various personal information, and eventually pushed me to give them a bunch of cash. (They claimed they’d accidentally transferred too much money to my account, and insisted that I had to withdraw it and send it to them via wire transfer.)

I figured out I was being scammed before actually giving them anything, and thanks to various precautions I’d already put in place the information they got is most likely useless. Also, I did scream at the guy and curse him out. Still, it was a humiliating and miserable experience, and I’m going to be cleaning up after these assholes for days if not longer, which means I get to return over and over to this miserable experience. Yay.

Scams like this are quite common—I’ve avoided a bunch and been duped by a couple over the last decade or so. I presume that most people have similar experiences. It’s just a part of life now—and a part that we don’t talk about much, because, again, getting scammed and fooled is humiliating.

No one likes to be a victim; no one likes to feel like they’ve trusted someone when they shouldn’t have. Getting scammed makes you look, and feel, like a butthead. More, it makes you paranoid—you worry that talking about details of the scam will make you vulnerable to the next asshole, and the next. It feels a lot safer, and a lot less exposed, to just keep these things to yourself.

But when you keep them to yourself, no one can really learn from them or know what to watch out for or how to protect themselves. I think the scammers rely on that, both at an individual level and at a political one. It’s hard to create the political will to throw real resources at stopping this sort of thing when people are embarrassed to admit it’s a problem that has happened to them personally.

So, I figured I’d admit it. If you get a notice that you should renew a subscription, look at the email very, very carefully before you set out to get that refund. If you get scammed, remember it’s not because you are a dope or a fool; it’s because we’ve pretty much decided as a society that we can’t do anything about scammers, and as a result they get a lot of space and a lot of time to figure out how to fool you.

I don’t have a lot of great ideas about how to stop this or what policy might improve things. But solidarity can’t hurt, and for solidarity people need to speak up. This is me doing that.