Am I the bad guy?
There's more than one way to be a scam victim.
I’m not sure how they did it, but some enterprising fraudster once appropriated my identity and started systematically trying to take over my financial accounts. The first I knew of it was when a text arrived from my phone company telling me that the new number I had requested would shortly be live, and my phone would be transferred over. Naturally, I contacted them immediately and made it clear that this did not come from me, so we were able to nip this in the bud. Passwords were changed, and I breathed a sigh of relief; I assumed that was the end of the matter. But I was wrong. The fraudster now had the bit between his teeth; he was presenting himself to the world as Jonathan Posner, and nothing was going to stop him making the most of the opportunity.
His next gambit was to try and take over my credit card account. But again, we were able to stop this, although a few transactions did slip through. It seems that my saviours, the worthy guys and gals at the credit card call centre, were ahead of him. Apparently, the Jonathan Posner who made contact with them had a foreign accent, whereas they seemed to know (having it on record?) that the genuine article speaks with an English accent. I’d love to have seen the screen the operator had in front of them; maybe there was a picture of me, with the caption, ‘speaks like a posh public school git.’ Anyway, it worked, and we managed to secure my account. Although on one of the many calls I had to make, the operator did inform me she had the ‘fake me’ on the other line at that very moment. I asked if I could speak to him – I’d love to have given him a piece of my mind after all the trouble he had put me through – but she politely advised that this would not be possible.
All of which brings me to the other side of scam victimhood that has affected me recently – one that’s not often featured on the many TV shows and articles on the subject. This is when a perfectly legit transaction is interpreted as ‘dodgy’, and the person making it (i.e. me) is deemed to be a scammer.
Let me explain.
I run a publishing company, and have recently taken on a project to help a lady in her 80s publish her memoir. So, after a fair bit of discussion, we agreed a payment for my services. All well and good. Her first payment was by cheque (hey kids, you might want to google what those were) – and I had to find a way to put it in my online-only bank. Eventually I managed this via the Post Office, and it duly appeared as a cleared payment in my account.
Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, it vanished. I later found out that it was because my client’s bank had unilaterally decided that I was most likely a scammer. Me! Apparently, they had come to the conclusion that at the very least I was trying to con her out of the money, or even worse, I was a thief who had stolen (or forged?) her cheque. Never mind that the cheque was made out to my limited company, which, if they had bothered to check (pun intended), had a valid entry at Companies House, a website and several reasonably long-standing social media accounts. She was on the phone to them for over an hour, during which time they subjected her to the kind of examination that might have drawn envious looks from the guys at MI5. They asked her how we had met, what she knew of my background, and whether I had applied any pressure to get her to release the funds. Presumably this was once they had realised that the cheque was genuine – so they must have parked the ‘cheque thief’ hypothesis, and were now galloping away down the route marked ‘conman scamming old ladies’.
Thankfully, she seems to have convinced them that we have a genuine business relationship, and that my intentions are perfectly honourable. Max Bialystok I ain’t. (You’d better google that one as well, kids). But it does leave me with a concern that my company name – and quite possibly my own – are now on some watchlist database as a potential scammer. Is this actually a thing? Do I need to talk to someone about it? Or should I just ignore it (like the many emails I get telling me that one of my books is just what a Hollywood production company is looking for)?
Or maybe I should just ‘lean in’ to the whole thing. If I’m assumed to be a scammer, what do I have to lose? Maybe I could start putting on a foreign accent, and try to open accounts in someone else’s name.
May as well live up to my reputation.
Jonathan Posner is a writer of action adventure novels set in the 16th century.
Jonathan is also a publisher at Winter & Drew Publishing.
