Asked and Answered!

I felt as though the information I got today was worth its own post. Please excuse any inconsistencies or typos. As I write this a cat is alternating between walking around on the keyboard and blowing her stank breath up my nose. I may pass out.

Anyway, turns out this whole bank putting a security hold on your card thing is a relatively well known scam! According to a reliable source (my father) people were doing this with phone numbers in Eastern Massachusetts for a while. One night around 11pm they dialed a number that turned out to belong to a State Police officer who was just getting off shift. He followed the prompts to some extent while getting technical support from his department and managed to trace the perpetrators and shut them down.

Unsurprisingly they, or people like them, have moved on to other states. Of course the way to avoid being taken in is not to respond in any way to the call but, from the comments I got on yesterday's post, you guys are plenty savvy about this sort of thing. I'm a little perturbed that I wasn't able to find an alert about this on Snopes and that the fraud department for HSBC claimed never to have heard of it. Of course perhaps I didn't search Snopes well and it's possible that news of this scam hasn't had time to reach India yet. 

I like the image of a state trooper getting out his can of cyber whup ass. Wish I had his phone number.