The Internet makes old people paranoid...

[elfs]

My mother called me Tuesday all freaked out because there was a strange billing amount on her monthly bank statement for $327.17, an electronic transaction from her account to a bank based in Puerto Rico. She wanted me to use "the Internet" to find out all I could about this transaction.

Hah. Too many Sandra Bullock films.

Omaha and I thought it was possibly identity theft. Mom was convinced that maybe, somehow, my brother had fallen back into his previous bad habits and was taking money out of her account. But it was a regular transaction; the same transfer was on her previous month's statement, which she hadn't read quite so closely before. Either that or it was identity theft. The bank was being as helpful as it could be, but Omaha and I talked to her about the process of generating a new bank account number and pulling the old one out of circulation, a common response to identity theft.

After calming Mom down and going through all this, she calls me back a half hour later and says she's figured it out. The number was weird, she admitted, so she looked it up and discovered that it's the maintenence fee on her condominium.

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

...which unless she gives the condo association the NEW number now won't get paid...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

No, fortunately, she figured this out before she initiated the number changeover. The bank office was closed for the day; she couldn't do anything about it until this morning. I'm just glad she figured it out before giving herself another hassle.

[bldrnrpdx.livejournal.com]

At least she checked into it (okay, asked you to check into it) instead of writing it off to old age and poor memory.

[danceswithlife]

Hm. Tom Smith (filkertom) has this really cool song called "Tech support for Dad" which you might totally appreciate.