I got a voicemail from the Kroger pharmacist who told me to call her back. It was definitely the Kroger pharmacy number because I’ve had to call it before, so that was not part of the scam.
However, some scammer who knew who my health insurance company was (I get it through my wife, which ads to the creepiness here) tried to get my personal health data from the Kroger pharmacy. They asked for personal info and the pharmacist said she wouldn’t give it to them but would have me call them back.
She told me all of this when I called her to find out what was up. She gave me the number and the first thing I did was look it up to see if it was legitimate because that just sounded off to me.
Sure enough, the first link that came up was a Facebook post (Why Facebook as the first link in the search? No idea.) warning about that number specifically scamming people by pretending to be my insurance company, followed by other links on other websites talking about it being a scammer source, and not just just for health insurance scamming.
They’ve also somehow fucked with the SEO because in between those were legitimate links to my health insurance company, but that phone number is not on the pages.
I feel really bad for anyone who falls for this, because it was clearly just legitimate enough for the pharmacist to not suggest to me that I should be careful about being scammed. I know exactly who I talked to and she’s a cool lady, so I’m pretty sure she would have if she was sure enough.
Don’t feel bad about it.
About three years ago I got a call from my credit card company asking me if I had booked a first class flight from New York to Milan for $2,000 and reserved a five star hotel in Italy for $1,000 a night, plus a few other hundred dollar charges of other things.
I have travelled overseas before but I’m a budget traveller and I wouldn’t spend money like that … plus my travelling days were basically over anyway … plus I don’t live, work or go near New York city, I’m in northern Ontario, Canada!
I cancelled the card immediately and started looking back on what I had done that led to this. The only thing I could point to was that about a month or two before, I had been playing around with a bunch of phone apps and a few Chinese face filter apps I had experimented with and had signed up to trial subscriptions without knowing it which gave my credit card information through Google Play. I’m very careful with my credit card and apply every security feature that is given but that one slip up gave me away. I now layer Google play purchases behind Pay Pal tagged to a limited Credit Card to just that account and with all security, two factor authentication I can apply on everything.
As security minded as all this can be, all security professionals agree that the weakest link to any secure system are the fallible humans (and I’m one of them) who operate this stuff.
I’m somewhat sure that when your pay for a subscription through the play store that it doesn’t send your full credit card information to any 3rd party, it’s google itself that does the credit card transaction
You are partly right … but if you sign up to a service to some of these dumb apps, they will redirect you to different sources to verify a purchase (whether it is legitimate or not). At the time, I was having a bunch of silly fun with my nieces and nephews fooling around with a new phone and finding new apps to play with. I think I got too carried away and wanted to get something to work without being careful enough.
The fun part was in finding some dumb face filter app that turned my big brown brooding middle aged male Indigenous face into a beautiful petite Asian princess that could talk and chat with my nieces and nephews. That was an expensive bit of fun that I paid for later.