I swear-ta-gawd, the hassles and the hustles never stop. They come in every which way from Sunday, and they come in every day AND Sunday.
Today, in comes an email purporting to be from Fidelity, where vast quantities of my father’s and DXH’s money are invested. And it is one weird email…
They want me to send them my signature.
Got that? They want to capture my signature electronically.
Uh huh.
So that ever so many Great Endeavors can be vastly simplified. And speeded up. And…
Uh huh.
Well.
To begin with, I don’t do business directly with Fidelity. I hire a guy, affectionately known in these precincts as Financial Dude, to run interference with Fidelity and just about all else financial in my life.
To end with, where the Hell did Fidelity get my personal email? BECAUSE I don’t do business with them directly, there’s no reason they should have my mac.com address.
Understand: I don’t believe Fidelity is trying to scam me. What I think is that either a) this is a legitimate message that for some incomprehensible reason was not sent through my financial manager or b) it’s a scam by crooks who found out that I had a Fidelity account and managed to extract the account number.
Scammers, many of them overseas, routinely target elder Americans. Check out this jaw-dropping piece from a guy who’s in the business of tracking them.
What I’m finding is that even when you’re aware of this phenomenon, even when you don’t pick up a phone unless you know who’s on the other end, it’s still hard to avoid. The scammers are bold; they’re convincing; and they’re persistent.
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Financial Dude says it’s not a scam: they just want an updated signature on some paperwork. I have no idea who to call there. And soooo… About the best I can do is tell whoever sent this request that there’s no way I’m sending my signature anywhere over the Internet, and they’ll need to send something in hard copy.
Heh. Won’t they just love that?