Reader's Note: This blog is associated with Jill's post from May 26, 2010 - link.
I’ve always been finicky when it comes to my money, and as such like many people do these days (or so I assume they do; surely I can’t be the only one this anal about record keeping) I maintain a spreadsheet with a running total of all transactions corresponding to my various bank accounts, credit cards, and what have you. The week after Jill (um, J-Tru) and I returned from our honeymoon, I logged in to my online banking system to see about my checking account balance and immediately I recognized that something was wrong because – thanks to my bookkeeping skills – I already had a ballpark figure in my head as to what my balance should’ve been, and the number I saw was significantly less than the amount I had in mind.
I don’t want to come off as sounding like a weirdo but I feel like I’ve had a clairvoyant vision once or twice in my life. Having just returned from the Bahamas and having used my debit card in a lot of strange places, I had a gut feeling that something might go wrong with my billing information.
I really hate being right sometimes…
Looking further into the matter, I recognized a transaction valued at $749.00 that was charged to my account by a PayPal vendor named HG Tickets. I can only think of two events that would warrant my paying that kind of money for tickets: 1 – WrestleMania, and 2 – an NCAA championship game featuring the University of South Carolina Gamecocks. Mania is held in March and football season is a few months away. What I’m getting at is that this was clearly a fraudulent charge and as such I immediately contacted my bank about having the transaction rescinded. The bank was very helpful in assisting me as they immediately refunded the money to my account. I was asked to sign an affidavit confirming that the transaction was fraudulent, and I did so without hesitation. As a precautionary measure my debit card was disabled and a new card as well as a new PIN was issued to me within a week’s time. In the days following my contact with the bank I received several pieces of correspondence updating me to the progress of their investigation, the final item I got from them let me know that their inquiry was complete and that they regretted any inconvenience I might have experienced. They were satisfied and at that moment so was I – but there was another party involved who wasn’t the least bit satiated by this turn of events.
Jump ahead to Tuesday, May 25, 2010. It’s around 8:20 AM and I’m about to leave home and head in to the office. As I’m about to open the front door our home phone rings; caller ID let me know that the call was coming from a “private caller”, which should’ve triggered an automatic reaction from me to ignore it. Even so, there have been a few occasions where my parents’ phone number has come up as private and given the fact that my Mom has had a major surgery performed in the past month I felt as though I should answer it. I did, but instead of hearing the voice of my Mom or Grandma I hear that of an unfamiliar man asking to speak to Robert Truesdale. “That’s me…”, I said, which was the second mistake I’d made in as many minutes.
The person I was speaking to identified himself as Mike Helco, an Ohioan and a representative of HG Tickets. He asked about a transaction involving the sum of $749.00 and, more specifically, wanted to know why I’d backed out of it. I told him the basics of the story as it pertains to me – that the transaction was fraudulent, that I’d contacted my bank about it, and that they’d refunded my money accordingly. And it was at that point that any semblance of cordiality this conversation might have contained flew out the window.
Have you ever been threatened with a lawsuit by some random person you wouldn’t know if they walked up and punched you in the face? Because I have!
For the sake of brevity, I’m going to try and condense what was said in the conversations that followed between me and Helco. Apparently someone was able to obtain my debit card number and establish a PayPal account (that was tied to an email address that uses my name but is not an address I own or have access to) which was then used to purchase a pair of NHL playoff game tickets.
Since the payment cleared my bank account, Helco shipped the tickets to the guilty party and the tickets were used by someone because he told me that he had a tape of the game and that he could physically identify who was there in those specific seats. I made the statement that it definitely wasn’t me, and he rather astutely fired back that I could’ve turned around and sold them to another individual – good theory, but he was still accusing me even though we’re both victims in this situation (a fact I never could get him to understand). I would later bring up the idea of tracking who received the tickets through whatever shipping company he’d used because certainly he would’ve wanted verification of such a valuable item being delivered. This wasn’t possible because he sent the tickets not through the post office and not by way of UPS or FedEx – he sent them via email (made possible by the fact that certain ticketing systems nowadays generate PDF files that the purchaser can then print at home, or forward to someone who then buys the tickets from them). It must be nice to be so trusting of technology.
Helco claimed to be a part of a larger company with offices around the U.S. My impression is that he’s a lone ticket broker (e.g., scalper) who lists his wares on auction sites like eBay and deals one-to-one with customers. I say this for several reasons. First and foremost, vendors like Ticket Master and Stub Hub allow ticket holders to sell their property but they do so through their own intermediary billing methods, not through PayPal. Jill and I searched the web for his company and found no information on it. What’s more, outside of collections agencies I’ve never heard of a legitimate company trying to sick a representative on an individual. For all these reasons, I think he’s on his own and that he’s trying to strong-arm someone (aka, me) into forking over the $749.
He called the house at least 6 times that day and his threats escalated from hitting me with civil action to saying that he would be alerting the FBI. His big piece of evidence was that he had obtained an IP address from the emails he had exchanged with whoever purchased the tickets and that this IP came back as being located in Great Falls, South Carolina. (I am from South Carolina but I don’t live in Great Falls nor have I ever had a residence in that city.) Fortunately, being an information technology professional, I know full well how easy it is to spoof (or forge) header information in an email. (If you weren’t aware, every email has a small set of data attached to it that allows for a certain amount of tracking; of course some evil genius figured out how to take advantage of this by inserting fake data into these fields so as to make the messages seem as if they’re coming from somewhere that they actually aren’t.) Those emails could’ve originated from Osaka, Japan for all he knows.
In the last conversation I had with Helco, he wanted to know why I didn’t file a police report. (A better question would be why he was so busy calling me instead of the police in his neck of the woods!) The way I see it, there was no point in doing so. I called the bank because I’m their customer and part of that relationship involves them being willing and able to analyze circumstances like these then possibly recommend criminal charges to the proper authorities. Besides, my concern was getting my money back, and going through the bank was the correct channel to take towards reaching that end.
Keep in mind I was supposed to have gone to work that day. I wound up having to call my employer and let them know that I was going to be out because I needed to take the time to cover my rear end, which is exactly what I did. I made contact with my bank, his bank, PayPal, the local municipal police department and the Orangeburg County Sheriff’s Office, and sought legal advice from a friend of my Uncle who is an attorney with the Social Security Administration in the state of South Carolina. They all basically told me the same thing: If this guy wants to expend the time, money, and effort to come down here and prosecute me given that I have the benefit of my bank standing behind me with results of their investigation – LET HIM! He’ll only wind up further in the hole and chances are once the smoke clears I’d be able to sue him for a range of offenses.
After the day I had dealing with this, I’d have settled for 5 minutes alone with Mr. Helco. I’m normally a laid back individual but I was beyond furious, so much so that if I’d have had him within arm’s reach I’d have gladly wrung his neck. But as it would turn out, I was reminded via a Facebook status message made by a very good friend of mine that the ways of wicked men shall not go unpunished.
Psalm 37: 27-29
Turn from evil and do good;
then you will dwell in the land forever.
For the LORD loves the just
and will not forsake his faithful ones.
They will be protected forever,
but the offspring of the wicked will be cut off;
the righteous will inherit the land
and dwell in it forever.
It’s amazing to me that just when we mere mortals feel disconnected from God, He reminds us of His presence. I tried to remind myself that Helco wasn’t the true villain in this series of events, even though he was doing a good job of coming off as one by persisting in his persecution of me, and that the truth of the matter would come out during whatever strife I might endure.
More or less for our own peace of mind, Jill and I decided it was best to have our home phone number changed so as to prevent further harassment from Helco. We contacted Time-Warner Cable, our provider for most things telecom related, and put in the order but were told that the processing time for a number change is 4 days and costs $25. Word to the wise, if a service provider wants to tack on a fee for performing a duty that is as basic as this there’s more than likely a way out of it, you just have to know what questions to ask. I mentioned to the operator that we’d been receiving harassing calls and she said the fee would not apply. Still, the 4 day wait wasn’t something she could pass over. Why it takes them 4 days to change a number is beyond me; I worked for Alltel several years ago and we could change someone’s number in a matter of minutes. Perhaps there’s more involved in doing so with landline connections, but regardless of the reasoning for the delay we went ahead and unplugged the phones in our house.
Suffice it to say that we felt like captives, almost as if we were being held hostage by this individual who was completely off kilter in his pursuit of reparations for a deed neither of us had anything to do with. I was hoping that we’d gotten to the end of this process now that the primary method of communication Helco had with us had been severed – just like a horror movie villain, he would rear his ugly head again despite our efforts.
Later that same week I pulled a notification from the United States Postal Service out of our mailbox that stated a package which required a signature for pick up was waiting for me at the local branch office. It goes without saying that this seemed highly suspicious given the events of the past few days. There was an article tracking number on the notice and when I looked it up on USPS.com, sure enough the shipment originated from Mc Donald, Ohio – Helco’s base of operations. (We knew this because Jill & I had tracked Helco down so as to try and learn more about this phantom menace; that phrase didn’t make sense when the movie first came out but it does now.) My immediate thought was that he’d followed through on his threats of legal action and that I was about to be drawn into the next step of the process by being served with some sort of paperwork notifying me of an impending court battle. What didn’t make sense to me was the timing of the shipment. According to data associated with the tracking number, the shipment was generated the morning Helco initially made contact with me, not long after our first conversation over the phone. He’d said that he was willing to give me time enough to look into the matter before engaging in any proceedings; not that I trusted him but the timetable didn’t seem to allow for that type of maneuvering.
I knew that a person has the right to refuse the delivery of mail, which was what lead me to believe that the best course of action would be to ignore it, whatever it was, and allow it to be sent back on its own. Just for the sake of security, I checked with my borrowed legal counsel and they recommended the contrary, that I pick up the package because doing so would make me seem less guilty (even though I wasn’t guilty at all).
I went to pick up the item the next day. There were only two cashiers working the front desk and they were incredibly busy seeing as how it was near the end of the month. The wait was excruciating in that it allowed my brain, which has always been good at making me feel paranoia even in the most innocuous of circumstances, to fumble through all the possible scenarios that might be about to unfold. By the time I got to the counter I was sweating profusely and wondering whether or not I was doing the right thing by accepting this package. After confirming my identity with the cashier, she handed me the envelope and I walked with it in hand down a relatively private hallway in the post office as I wanted to open the thing on the spot. I peeled back the security tab and looked inside.
In considering the possibilities of what might be in that envelope, I had of course thought that there could be something incriminating to it. I was dealing with someone who had already threatened to bring charges against me; surely it would then be in his realm of consideration to try and bolster his position by putting me deeper into the circumstances by making it look as if I had something to hide or was in any way involved. As it would turn out, the envelope contained the tickets that this whole ordeal centered upon.
I remember being completely aghast at the sight of them, even though they were quite beautiful in their pristine and unused condition. Looking at them, I could tell why someone had paid almost $800 for them – they were front row seats. I don’t know much of anything about the Pittsburg Penguins franchise but in doing some research I discovered that the tickets wound up being to the final game that would ever be played in Mellon Arena, which I understand is something of an iconic building to Penguins fans. I stood there in the post office thinking to myself that I had just accepted stolen property through the mail and that I should’ve trusted my instincts to ignore the shipment instead. I have honestly never felt as unnerved as I did in that instant.
It took some time but logic soon took over from paranoia and my head got clear enough that I was able to reason things out. Not so much why Helco had went through the expense of mailing me the tickets (it cost him $18), rather why my having them at that point in time didn’t actually mean very much. The game the tickets were for was played on May 12, 2010 – they were shipped to me on May 25, 2010 and I also had proof of my having taken possession of them after that date. Yes, I had the tickets at that point in time but I might as well have been holding two used hot dog wrappers. What I mean by that is that they may have been worth $749 on May 12 but on May 25 they weren’t worth squat because the game to which they corresponded had already been played. Hence the question, how could something with no value be incriminating?
My next move was to document everything. I’ve always been hyper-organized, which is why if you look in my personal file cabinet you’ll find roughly 3 years worth of receipts for everything from my utility payments on down to my Sears charge account. I’d already started a file with documentation pertaining to the fraudulent charge investigation, and this file was augmented into what I hoped would not wind up being my defense in any sort of litigation that might come about as a result of my having gotten roped into this mess. I took pictures and made scans of the envelope and the tickets. I’d already made copies of all of my other documentation, so I went about putting the copies back into my file cabinet for ease of access and then secured the originals as well as the envelope used to send me the tickets in our fire safe. The tickets were going back to Ohio, but they would have company on their trip.
If you’ve never written a “cease & desist” type letter, I can tell you that it’s oddly liberating. I couldn’t be as venomous as I would’ve liked to have been (I decided it was best to omit the part I’d written about hoping that Helco would contract syphilis, chronic diarrhea, testicular and rectal cancer, leprosy, and the black plague) but I was firm in laying out the facts as well as letting him know that I didn’t appreciate having been accused of a crime I did not commit and that if he tried to contact me or anyone associated with me ever again that I’d make sure he was brought up on harassment charges.
I’d picked up the tickets on May 28, 2010, the Friday before Memorial Day. With postal services being limited on weekends, I made the decision to ship them to Helco via UPS second-day air. I had a fleeting idea to enquire about a shipping option that would require him to pay for it upon delivery; that would’ve been too bold, at least for me, and it probably would’ve backfired somehow anyway. With signature confirmation, it cost me just shy of $22 to ship the tickets and the letter. This fiasco had already cost me a day’s work and untold hours of stress, now it was literally costing me even more.
Because I watch too many crime drama television shows, I had to try and figure out where the lapse in security happened that lead to my banking information being available to whatever waste of skin managed to get hold of it (not that it would do any good, ultimately; I guess I wanted someone to blame more than anything). I knew that the perpetrator had my name, home mailing address, home phone number, and my debit card number. The only two entities I can think of that I have given those bits of data to are Time-Warner Cable and Carnival Cruise Lines. Sure, it's possible it could've come from somewhere else but I highly doubt it. That said, if anyone from those institutions would like to step up and apologize to me for having fumbled some of the most sensitive data a person has, I'd accept it.
My UPS shipment was confirmed the following Tuesday. It’s been close to two weeks since then and I have yet to hear anything else from him or anyone associated with this matter. That said, I’m hoping that I’m done with this chaos. Needless to say, the last thing I hoped for coming off of our wedding and honeymoon was to spend the better part of a week worrying about whether or not I was going to be pegged as the fall guy in a scam of this nature. The only positives to come from this are my having sympathy for anyone who’s been the victim of identity theft because I can now be counted amongst those poor schmucks and a newfound sense of dread when it comes to electronic transactions.
I know what you’re saying, “How can a newfound sense of dread be perceived as positive?” I relate it to how I’m sure soldiers in World War II felt after having seen one of their buddies wind up being the victim of a landmine; when you’ve experienced that kind of damage first hand, it makes you even more hesitant to take your next step. Likewise, this incident has made me much more considerate of the dangers of handing over your banking information to a merchant, expecting it to be managed securely. It hasn’t made me want to bury all my money in a coffee can in the back yard, but it has made me more wary and seeing as how a majority of all transactions are conducted electronically anymore I believe that’s the best I can achieve. Indeed, with risks like this looming, almost every modern marketplace is a minefield – you just have to hope you aren’t the one who sets one off.
- Rob
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