Author: ken.chowder

Apparently most people who steal credit-card info resell it on the Net, also publically. There are literally millions of credit cards for sale, right out in the open.

I like you get email offers to be cheated every day. Often they start, in essence, like one I got today:

“Here’s a personal message from bar fred lious: GIVE ME YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE I AM AN EXECUTOR OF WILLS IN LAW, A SITUATION ARRIVE ON MY CLIENT…”

I enjoy these mails, as I’m sure you do. But I’m a little stunned at the sheer number of them – probably a couple dozen a day. They all want to cheat me. Maybe I ought to be flattered, but I’m bemused. At the risk of sounding like your parents, or more precisely your grandparents, I remember the days when my own grandfather would take my brother and me out to pick wild strawberries in our field, equipping us each with a small tin bucket that gave out a “plop” sound with each berry (at first), or my bro and I would play war from our rickety treehouse in the woods, or at the end of the long summer days we would do jigsaw puzzles on the screened-in porch while fireflies did their intermittent incendiary thinking in the tall grass, and on such a day no one in the world (or so it seemed) tried to cheat any of us at all. What a quaint world.

Oh, maybe it wasn’t an honest world; maybe it was just a world where cheating took more effort, or was more invisible. It was the one celebrated, for instance, by John Cheever:

“… just gazing at the lights in heaven, I am as thrilled as I am thrilled by the more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life.”

Cheever could bask in the surety of suburban pleasures without ever coming into contact with bar fred lious’s arriving situation. He could write that way because, as he walked his dog or watered his lawn, there weren’t twelve people trying to cheat him every moment.