“I’ve been hacked, badly this time.” It had happened before, several times actually, with the ordinary effect: 500 e-mails to friends, acquaintances, and connections, asking for money to get me home from The Philippines, where I’ve never been; or bearing financial offers that don’t exist; or porn sent under my name with lewd nude pictures claiming to be me. This time was different.
In November, I received an e-mail from a company offering to monitor my computer for dangerous downloads, who said that said they would clean them out instantly. I’d had enough of those downloads (see paragraph above) not to be intrigued. I called the company and, after a half-hour conversation with a reasonable gentleman who spoke unaccented English, contracted them. I felt good about it. Three months later, they called to offer me some other services. I had already paid them $300, so I wasn’t too interested in extending the service for an additional $1,000.
They offered to monitor my phone to prevent incoming calls, texts, emails from specified sources (I was to indicate which numbers, organizations, and individuals to prevent). I didn’t feel it necessary and said so, but somehow they still managed to deduct $1,000 from my bank account through my credit card. When I protested, they hung up on me. I called them back and then things got even worse.
Now, I am not a pipeline company, not a railroad, not an insurance company nor anything else that might be construed as vitally important. I am a novelist, journalist, theater critic. But even so, I was on the road to Hell, to ransomware. I’m not sure I even knew what ransomware was back in February of this year. I had heard of it, sure. But I hadn’t seen it in action. It doesn’t require you to be large or important. It only asks that you have a computer, a bank account, and a credit card. And who doesn’t have those things?
They called again. This time I spoke to a man with a Pacific Islander accent named Jim Ravitch. “We have just collected $1,700 for our services,” he said to me. “You already have $300,” I replied, “so that makes it $2,000.” “Oh, no,” he replied. “We had $1,300, so this makes it $3,000.” I was almost too shocked to respond, but when I did I shouted something I’m uncomfortable writing down. “You can get it back,” he said. “Calm down.” I was rattled that calming down was not something I could easily do.
“How?” I asked him. There was no response for a while and then he said, “So, you want your money back?” I replied “Yes, I do and I want to cancel your service. I don’t want to have anything more to do with you.” “Oh, that’s not so simple. You’ve had a contract with us for almost four months.” “And what have you done?” I asked. “We’ve protected your computer. You can’t have your money back on that.” “It’s been four months, that’s $100 worth. Keep that and return the rest,” I said. Even before he stopped laughing, I knew I was in trouble. “We’ll keep it all, seeing how you’ve been so much trouble,” Ravitch said.
“I’ve been ‘trouble’ and what do you think you’ve been?” I asked. “You have no right to my money. I am a dissatisfied customer and I want my money back.” “NOPE,” he said. “Say goodbye to your $3,000.” I demanded to speak to his supervisor and he laughed again, but I persisted. Finally, he said a mocking “okay, okay” and put me on hold. Within 10 minutes, another man was on the phone with me. His name was David Jones.
I told him exactly what had transpired and let him know how upset I was. He placated me with gentle words and assured me he would take care of things. He gave me his direct phone number. He promised to call me back the next morning at 10 o’clock.
He didn’t call. So, at 11 o’clock, I called him. “He’s not in yet,” a secretary told me. “I don’t expect him before 3 p.m. today.” At 3 p.m. on the dot, I called him again and this time he picked up the phone. “Oh, Mr. Bergman, things are going to be all right. I’ve fired Mr. Ravitch. You’ll never hear from him again. He is gone from this company. We have kept all of his records, so he has no access to your number or your credit card. You’re done with him. I am going to personally take care of this for you from now on.” I thanked him profusely. “The next step is not so easy, however,” he said. “We have put a lock on your computer so that no one can access it. That’s a safeguard for you.”
“When you say no one, of course you don’t mean me,” I replied. “Sadly, it is you, too,” he said. “It’s not for long. Just until we solve the money thing.” I tried my computer, but got no response at all. “Look, Mr. Jones, I need my computer. I do all my work on it.” “It’s just for a day … or so … until we can work all this out,” he repeated. “What is there to do? Just refund my money and let me go,” I said. “It’s not that easy. You see, we don’t have your $300. He has it.” I felt myself getting angry again. “It’s not $300,” I said in my loudest voice. “It’s $3,000. That’s what he took from me.” “Well, that’s a lot of money for us to have to refund when we don’t have your money. He does.”
I began to suspect we were a long way from resolving this.
Sure enough, he called me again about 30 minutes later. “This is going to take a bit longer to resolve,” he said. “We have a corporate banking problem here. I cannot refund your $3,000 right away. It may take a few days to get this under control.” I was upset and told him so. “You’re keeping me from earning my living here,” I announced. “We’re so sorry, but until the bank problem is fixed I cannot do a thing. We’re working on it, so please bear with us.” He hung up and I was left hanging — no computer, no money, no sense of having solved anything except getting the crook fired. Or so I thought.
Luckily, I could receive and send e-mails on my phone, but I couldn’t write articles, so I was stuck with a situation that threatened to end a lot of things for me. Four days went by before Mr. Jones called me again.
“We figured out a way to fix your problems, Mr. Bergman,” he said. “We will transfer $8,000 into your bank account and then you can send us back $5,000. That will make us even and we can release your computer back to you.”
“That makes no sense to me. Why not just send me back the money you stole from me? Well, not you, but your company.”
“We have a corporate banking problem. Our account restricts us from paying out anything less than $8,000. It’s all we can do. Now, I know you’re a responsible person who wouldn’t cheat us out of our own money. Especially when we’re trying to help you out, work with you. This is our best deal.”
“I don’t understand this at all,” I said. “It seems foolish to send me so much money just to get a refund of illicit funds. I’d have to wait for that amount to clear before I could send you back any of it.”
“Don’t you have enough in your account to just send us a check for that much?” he asked. “Yours is a personal account and not a special corporate account like ours. I’m sure you must have $5,000 and we’d be sending you much more than that.”
I knew I had enough, but this just didn’t feel right to me. “I’ve already left you with $3,000 of my money,” I said. “I didn’t want to, but that’s what you’ve gotten. Or somebody has.” There was a moment of silence between us and then Mr. Jones said, “I know it’s strange, but this is the only way we can do this.”
“Well, at least release my computer so I can work,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. Not until this is resolved,” he said. “Why don’t you check your account online and see if you have enough to make the payment.” “I don’t do online banking,” I replied. “Well, we can help you with that,” he said. “We can help you set that up and then you can watch your account.”
I was hesitant, but he was being so helpful. His reassurances seemed so genuine. I felt encouraged and agreed to let him help me set up an online link to my account. While working on it, he informed me that he had authorized the transfer of the $8,000 into my account while we worked. Ten minutes later, he finished setting up my personal access to my bank account. I opened the link and brought up a statement of my account’s holdings and pay-outs and, sure enough, there was the latest accounting, including the deposit of $8,000. I was very impressed. I told him I would go to my bank branch and get the $5,000 check authorized right away.
“Don’t say what the check is for,” Mr. Jones told me. “Banks frown on this sort of transaction. Tell them something else. Anything else. Make the check out to Ellen Franklin. If they ask you about it, say it’s a cousin in Europe who needs the money. They’ll understand that.”
“Who’s Ellen Franklin?” I asked him.
“She works in our payment authorization department. I’ll let her know to expect a call to approve the payment. Here’s her number.” We hung up and I headed out to my Mountain One branch to finish this exchange. I took with me a printout of my bank statement from the internet banking site.
That was where everything changed. At the bank, the desk clerk asked me to wait while she spoke to a manager. I waited. He came out of his office and asked me a few simple questions before he said that he believed I was the victim of a banking fraud scam. I showed him the statement I had brought with me and he had his assistant pull up my account and print what should have been an identical statement, but proved not to be. It showed no deposit of $8,000. I was flummoxed, then upset. Then I told him everything in a single, unending emotional burst of facts. He, Brian, took me into his office and set to work.
Within minutes, the entire scam was exposed. I couldn’t believe what was set before me. Brian had me call Mr. Jones while he listened to my side of the conversation and had me write down the phone number. Jones was both hostile and rude to me. He called me a fool, which I felt I had been, and he told me he wouldn’t release my computer. He threatened to take my money directly from my bank account. Luckily, the bank manager had already closed my account, removing all my funds and putting them into a holding account until we had concluded my business with Jones and his organization. Jones made all sorts of threats and then hung up on me.
Brian had me call him again, and this time an operator interrupted to announce that the number was not a working phone number. He had done that very quickly. The earlier numbers I had for them were at home, so I couldn’t try them. In the meantime, Brian set up new accounts and credit card access numbers, and went over all the protocols involved in trying to save the day. He set up a procedure to try to retrieve the $2,700, but this was ultimately not doable. We looked through my account to discover that the $8,000 Jones had presumably transferred to me was almost exactly what I had in my account and, rather than returning my $3,000, would have left me with less than that. We continued working until everything I had was secured. I went home to a quiet computer. It had been a week without any real access.
Without a computer, I didn’t know where to turn to fix the situation. I finally mustered up enough confidence to tell a friend whose business was based on computer use, about what had happened. She was very sympathetic and also annoyed that I had been taken in so easily. “I’ll ask around for someone who can help you get your computer back,” she said. “Thank you, Mary,” I said. “Anything you can do will be so helpful.”
Minutes later, Jones called me from a “restricted” number. He was smug and resolute. “Send me the $8,000 you owe me or I’ll destroy you. I’ll take your reputation from you. You’ll never get your computer back,” he said, “and that’s what you deserve.” I refused. “You only have this one chance,” he said. “I can do what I told you. I’ll make you pay one way or another.” Again, I refused and told him what I thought of him and his company. He tried a third time, but I stood my ground and refused to send him any money. “We’ve stolen everything on your computer, taken it all and will destroy it. You should have sent us the money!”
He hung up and I never heard from him again. I was scared about the loss, but proud of taking a stand, a position of strength in spite of everything I had potentially jeopardized. I may have been foolish, overly trusting, and incompetent in protecting myself thus far, but now I felt that things were possibly in my court.
Three days later, Mary called with the names of two people who might be able to help me. I knew one of them and decided to call him. Jim was very sympathetic when I told him the story and he agreed to look at my machine, clean it, and try to restore it. Three days later, he picked it up and took it away.
In the meantime, I called the FBI. I gave them all the information I had: four phone numbers, names, a Florida address, and a detailed report on what had gone on over my four-month relationship with these people. They promised to look into it after first telling me there was very little hope that I’d ever get anything back. That didn’t help my mood. By now, I had been unable to complete my work, and had very little access to email addresses or phone numbers, all of which had been stored on my computer and nowhere else. I was in a holding pattern and it was as uncomfortable as the last bits of contact had been with David Jones (“Davey Jones,” I had realized, was 1950s code for pirates, ironically).
At the end of the week, Jim called to say he had “deep-cleaned” my computer, so it was usable again and he thought that, due to my cloud storage, he could probably restore much of what I had presumably lost. He would be in touch. Two days later, he called to say he was ready to return the machine. We made an appointment.
He spent about two hours setting me up and, miraculously, all of my files seemed to be intact and available. It had now been just under a month that I’d been without a computer. I can think of no greater thrill than finding out that my life and my work had not been lost. He only wanted a token fee, for which I was grateful. I still owe him and his wife dinner; I’ll cook them something grand very soon.
Brian called me about a week later to tell me that the bank had not been able to stop payment or to recover the $2,700 I had lost ($3,000 with the original contract fee). I told him that I had spent the two weeks getting back not just my computer access but all of my work stored on it. I told him about my FBI report and he wished me luck with that. It has now been two months and still nothing from them, and I don’t expect to ever hear from them as they have much bigger fish to fry in this ransom scam.
I am not a corporation or a pipeline, as I said, only a tiny fish in a big pond, like some of you, I imagine. So, take my story to heart and BEWARE of anything that seems too good to be true, or any offer of protection that comes your way. They only protect themselves.
