Do you ever just reach your last straw with having people try to scam you all the time? As a historian, I remind myself often that the human impulse toward greed is as old as the hills. The means of execution, however, become more sophisticated every year.
A couple of days ago I got an email from Earthlink, our email provider, saying that my credit card info needed updating or somesuch. As a rule I don't ever reply to these messages, and I stuck to my guns per usual. I'm glad I did, because even though the return address was "[email protected]," and even though the link was to "https://myaccount.earthlink.net/," it's all a fake. My technohusband showed me how I can find the real link by holding my mouse over the alleged web address, and then the encrypted address will appear. Sneaky bastards.
You know what the tip-off was? They misspelled "processing." It seems that in almost every one of these spam emails, something is not quite right. Apparently they don't teach grammar and spelling in Evil School. At least, not yet.
But it's not always just the illegitimate , faux companies that are trying to part me from my money prematurely. My snail mail box has been flooded lately with subscription renewal demands from many of the magazines that I receive, including legit outfits like Kiplinger's and Budget Travel. These notices make it sound like my subscriptions are about to expire, when in both cases I have more than a year left on them. Thank heavens for Quicken, which makes it a snap to check my own records and see when I last renewed. Jeepers.
OK, one last bit of consumer kvetching, and then I promise I'll be back next time with a bona fide review. For years I've kept our short-term savings with a wonderful money market fund that pays a nice yield and has zero expenses. Well, I learned last year -- the hard, painful way -- that one of the reasons it can afford to do this is that it holds on to customers' money for ages and ages before making it "available." Last September I paid my quarterly taxes from this account, only to get a nasty notice from the IRS some weeks later saying my check had bounced. I had to repay all the money plus a $60 fee to Uncle Sam. I was puzzled by this, because I had received a statement from the company just before I paid my taxes, confirming the receipt of a deposit and listing my funds. But no! As the patient customer service representative explained to me on the phone, it actually doesn't matter if the money is on your statement . . . it takes TEN BUSINESS DAYS for it to post to your account! So even though the statement is dated from the day after I made the deposit, I was supposed to wait an additional nine business days before my money would be my money. Aaaaaaugh. So basically, the MMF gets to enjoy the overnight float for about two weeks, including weekends. The CS rep told me several times that this had all been explained in the 6-point font on the last page of the packet when I opened my account. Oh.
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