On fraud and other random criminal activity!!

Aargh angst, I spend my life online. Banking, social media, food shopping, party planning, clicking and collecting... If I think of it, I log on and buy it. It is either on its way or reserved and waiting for me next time I'm in town. I hardly ever make calls, it's all emails, tweets, direct messages...I'm not even sure I can use a biro at this point??

But this week the world of online ease and speed has been compromised. BFF has had some random Russian money phishing bastards try and hack into her personal bank account. (This could possibly have something to do with her inadvertently filling in a phishing email, but it's easily done and no one blames her, except maybe her Husband, but that's by the by!!) Luckily her bank were on the ball and thought 'you want to order new cards AND change your billing address? Hang on a second...' and nothing was taken. But for someone with OCD and considerable anxiety issues this has resulted in her deciding all online activity is a minefield and henceforth only using cash and cheques for everything. Ever!

This is both weird and confusing to me. For starters, we don't use cheques so on the rare occasion we need to write one we have to search the bloody house top to bottom for the cheque book, have a small row, accuse each other of losing it, then find it!! It still has my maiden name on, that's how long it's taking us to use up the cheques!! (We got married in 2007!) But also, you're covered in the event of fraudulent activity, so what's the big fuss?

Either way, I suppose I can appreciate her reaction. It must be terribly violating and leave you feeling rather vulnerable when something like that happens. Not to mention thinking, shit I use that password for bloody everything!! I'd have to spend a week changing every password to every account I have, then consequently forget the new one, get locked out of everything, have to make phonecalls...the mere thought makes my blood run cold. Maybe I do use online too much?

Anyway, I thought I was quite cool, calm and collected about such matters. You know, one of those 'well I have £13.42 in my personal account, Russian mob boss, so go ahead, knock yourself out' kinda people?! But she's obviously rubbed off on me as this morning, when I saw two random paypal transactions on our joint bank account I flipped. I frantically called the bank, who advised me to speak to paypal...there was talk of direct debits, reference numbers, authorisations, security queries...turns out it was Husband buying a golf club via eBay. Fucks' sake!!

Was late for nursery and needed another coffee. All before 9am!!