Netflix and Ill Will

About a month ago or so, I tried to watch a show on Netflix. The Netflix I pay for. It told me I couldn’t watch anything because too many other people who don’t pay for my Netflix were busy using it.

I didn’t like that answer, so I went through the annoying process of changing the password to kick everyone else out. If my sons in college want to watch Netflix, they can pirate it from some teenage “free” TV app like all their friends do, dammit.

Everything was back to normal after the password change until two days ago when I got a series of emails from Netflix.

Now, I get “A new device is using your account” emails from my streaming apps all the time, usually when one of the boys or my wife watches something on their phone. I’ve become accustomed to ignoring them, because they never give any useful information. It’s always “Device: Smartphone. Location: North or South America.”

I got a few of those usual “new device” emails and then some new ones. “Thanks for adding an Extra Member account” was the subject of one, and “The $7.99/month Extra Member fee has been added to your bill” was the subject of another.

Normally, I would immediately discount those as spam, but they looked legitimate enough that I investigated further. Sure enough, they were coming from the real Netflix. Hmm… I don’t think I like this…

When I logged into Netflix from my computer – something I never do because I am 52 years old and only watch TV on TV’s – I discovered that, lo and behold, some jackass had logged into my account and made themselves at home.

I have always tried to keep my TV streaming passwords simple and all the same, because I will inevitably have to “type” them into the screen using the remote arrow keys and the enter button, which, as you know, is almost as annoying as a popcorn kernel fragment stuck between your teeth, or trying to fish something small out of your garbage disposal. I guess my universal streaming password was a little too unsophisticated, because some total rando apparently figured it out.

I didn’t even bother asking one of the boys if they did it, because they aren’t that dumb. They know we have taxes, fees, and penalties around here for unauthorized stupidity. I’ve been preparing them for having to answer to the IRS since they were old enough to know what money is.

It would be one thing if this guy had simply hacked the account and watched Netflix on one of the existing profiles. That probably would have gone undetected. Sure, the show recommendations and “already watched” would have gotten squirrely, but we probably would have shrugged it off and assumed Netflix was out of whack, or accused my mother-in-law of using the wrong profile.

But no, this winner made himself his own profile named “FAUSTO,” complete with a stupid-looking Anime-ish face, and then proceeded to purchase an Extra Member pass, just for himself. I guess he also got tired of getting kicked out of my Netflix and fixed the problem in his own way.

I’m honestly not sure whether to face palm or tip my cap to his gutsy move.

Either way, the Netflix password has been beefed up, along with all the other streaming passwords, just in case Fausto likes Hulu or Paramount Plus as much as Netflix. There’s an afternoon of my life I won’t get back.

And seriously, Fausto, my Netflix subscription is like twelve bucks a month. If you can’t afford that, you shouldn’t be watching TV in the first place. Get off your ass and get a job!

As for me, I’m just giddy with anticipation about getting to “type” the new longer and more complicated password with the handy remote control arrow button system for every streaming service on every TV.

I think I’m actually starting to miss paying for cable…

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Florida Offshore Phishing

Not many people take full advantage of the fun side of internet phishing scams, and I must say, they are missing out on some truly satisfying entertainment.

Back when Al Gore had just invented the internet, the first professional phishermen were the Nigerians. They were pioneers in the art of internet skullduggery, so much so that their name is forever associated with the “deposed king of (insert African country name here), let me share my millions with you, just give me your banking information” email scam.

Many, many years ago I worked for a company that – and millennials, you will not believe this, but I swear it’s the truth – had one email address for the whole company. As the junior engineer, I was the most tech-savvy (meaning I knew how to spell “tech”), so I was in charge of the account. Every morning I would fire up the modem (a device that served mainly to make your internet connection slower than you ever thought imaginable) and log in to our account, print out the emails (on paper!), and disperse them to my coworkers. This was back in 1826.

One morning, much to my delight, we received an email from the son of the (recently murdered in a coup) Crown Prince of Nigeria. He was anxious to wire me ten million dollars because he would be tragically killed just like his dad if he was caught with the money. I would hold onto the cash while he snuck out of his war-ravaged kingdom, then we’d meet here in the U.S., split the windfall, and then, presumably, party like rock stars and become BFF’s.

There was just one catch. He had no access to any money, so it was up to me to front him a little dough to, as he so eloquently put it, “greeze the palms” of the local banking officials.

I then spent two weeks looking forward to each morning when I would respond to his emails pretending to be a doddering old fool who was super-excited about the opportunity but not really sure how to carry out all his complicated banking instructions.

At some point, right around the time I was asking if I could come to Nigeria to help with the greezing, and asking him if I could stay at his house while I was there since I didn’t know if any of the hotels were up to my standards, I was passed off to the Nigeria Scamming Department Manager. Sadly, as with most American middle managers, he had less finesse than the low-level scam starter guy that had initiated contact, and over the next few days the manager guy became increasingly less patient with me.

He finally ended our budding financial relationship in an all-caps email demanding to know what the hell was wrong with me and why I couldn’t follow simple instructions. (Perhaps because I never could quite figure out what he meant by my “bank account number,” and gave him several different options, including the bank’s phone number, their address number on the outside of the building, and also the exact number of accounts the bank had, after I called the bank manager to inquire.)

I could almost see him banging away on the keyboard in a spitting rage. It was one of the most delightfully entertaining two weeks of my life.

I had a few fleeting moments of that same joy yesterday and today, when I was contacted via phone - from a number in Florida - by the “Google Gmail Security Team.” A nice gentleman named Dave, with a heavy Indian accent, explained that my Gmail account had apparently been hijacked by spammers, and it would be shut down and locked within twenty-four hours if we didn’t fix it right away.

Oh, my! What a predicament we have found ourselves in! Especially since Google doesn’t call people. Whatever shall we do?

I kept him on the phone as long as I could, but I was driving, so I couldn’t take the necessary steps at my computer terminal to secure my account from the insidious hackers. It turned out he was located in Wilmington, Delaware, and not Florida, and he seemed to think the weather in Wilmington was “pretty mild,” that early December day. I guess Dave doesn’t really understand where Delaware is located.

Sadly, I had an appointment to get to, so I had to ask Dave for a callback number. He gave me an 800 number that, upon later Googling, could either have been associated with an opportunity to buy an apartment in Delhi, or a web design and internet marketing firm in Pasadena. Hmm…

I thought my fun was over, but in a wonderful turn of events, Dave called back this morning. Great news, Dave! I’m home and can get to my computer terminal. Let’s fix this vexing issue!

All I had to do was log out of my Gmail, get to my home screen, hit the Windows key and the letter R simultaneously to bring up the run command prompt, and simply type in “iexplore 216.115.218.200/505877301”. Once I did that, we could get this problem solved. He had to get off the line briefly to get the last string of digits. I guess they don’t always get that far, and he needed to ask his manager what the code was today.

I told Dave that I typed it all in just like he said, and I could almost hear him salivating in “Delaware.” He asked what I was seeing, hoping that I was looking at their screen cloning site located at the 216 IP address. I told him my screen had gone blank.

Dave, ever the Gmail security professional, had to come up with a series of blank screen troubleshooting tips while I quizzed him on why the Google logo was all gray today instead of colored, and how the Wilmington weather was this morning, and if he was calling me on his old Florida cell phone, or if their office had been blown down the coast in the last hurricane, and if he’d ever been out to Topeka, Kansas where the main Google campus is located, and if so, while he was there, had he tried the world-famous “Google Burger,” which I had been told was a tofu burger stamped in the letter G, with red ketchup, yellow mustard, blue lettuce, and green tomatoes, on a gluten-free ciabatta roll.

After powering down my device didn’t work, an increasingly frustrated Dave finally accused me of wasting my own time. I assured him that this was not at all a waste of my time, but he apparently had better things to do with his day, so he wished me - what I’m pretty sure was sarcastic - good luck with my soon-to-be frozen Gmail account.

I thought for sure my fun was over, but lo and behold, ten minutes later, Steve from Gmail Support called me from the exact same number.

Halleluiah!

I asked how Dave was doing, but it turned out that Steve was really in Florida, and didn’t know Dave, or anything about a recent call. I told Steve he needed to contact the folks at Guinness after our call, because he just set a land speed record, but he had no idea what I was talking about.

It seems Steve was calling because Google noticed that my Gmail account had apparently been hijacked by spammers, and it would be shut down and locked within twenty-four hours if we didn’t fix it right away.

Oh, my! What a conundrum, Steve!

I asked if I should get to my run command and type in “iexplore 216.115.218.200/505877301”, but Steve hung up on me before I could finish reading the number string.

I am currently sitting at my desk praying that I get a call from Mike who works at Gmail Google Security Support in the greater Florida-Delaware region.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen

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Hacker Grammar Bad

When my sisters and I were growing up, my mom constantly hammered home good grammar and spelling. If we said, “Me and my friends went to the park,” we were immediately corrected with, “My friends and I…”

“Ain’t” was forbidden to be uttered within a six-block radius of her home, and any misspelled words were underlined for correction before homework was allowed to be returned.

This continued through our high school years, and beyond, into college, and even continues today if I have a rare grammatical slip-up while talking with my mother on the phone. Anyway… When I was sent off into the world with my impeccable grammar and spelling, it started to become clear to me right away why my mother was so insistent on using English correctly. Good grammar is one of the trademarks of polite, civilized, educated society. There is no quicker way to be dismissed in business, or to be discounted as a miscreant, than to not know how you should talk good.

Yet, as with so many annoying things your parents did to you, only after you become a parent yourself do you truly understand the value, and truly appreciate their efforts. Poor grammar offends my very senses, and misspellings jump off the page at me as if they were highlighted. Today, I am riding grammatical herd on my boys, just like my mom did with us. “You didn’t throwed the ball, son, you threw it.”

And as with all labors of love, many of the fruits of said labors aren’t realized until much, much later. My mom could have never have known it at the time, but she was helping the next generation fight off computer hackers. Way to go, Mom!

Hackers, as a rule, have atrocious grammar. I’m not sure if this is because they are all phishing from North Korea, China, and Nigeria, and just don’t have the lingo down pat, or if they are simply American-born-and-raised ne’er-do-wells, or both. I guess it really doesn’t matter, as long as they keep tipping their hand with missing verbs. Here’s an example of something I received the other day:

An e-mail from an address that was vaguely official, but not quite, like “manager@creditaccount.com,” with a subject line reading, “Your Credit Card Overdue.” (Good start, guys!)

Dear Customer,
Your Credit Card is one week overdue.
Below your Card information
Customer 7990682142
Number XXXXXX
Card Limit XXXXXX
Pay Date 29 Jun 2011
The details are attached to this e-mail.
Please read the financial statement properly.
If you pay debt within 2 days, there will be no extra-charges.
In 2 days $25 late fee and a finance charge will be imposed on your account.
Please do not reply to this email, its automatic mail notification.
Thank you.

The attachment was a zip file titled “account_information.zip,” that surely contained a password stealing program or a virus of some flavor.

Now, come on, fellas! How stupid do you think I am? I mean, how hard would it be to find someone who can actually speak and read English to proofread your idiotic fake account alert?

The ridiculousness of it amazes me, but at the same time, it is totally understandable. If they had more smarts, they wouldn’t be criminals in the first place. Like the dynamic duo a few years ago that tried to rip an ATM out of the ground with their pickup truck. They attached a chain from their rear bumper to the ATM, and then hit the gas. The ATM stayed put and their bumper ended up on the ground. They had long since sped away from the scene of the almost-crime when the police arrived. The cops simply ran the license plate, found still attached to the bumper that was still attached to the ATM, and drove to their house to pick them up.

For a minute or two, you shake your head and wonder to yourself, “Why didn’t they at least retrieve the plate, let alone the bumper and the chain?” But then, the more you think about what they tried to do, and how they tried to do it, you say to yourself, “Of course they left it behind.”

Same thing is true, I guess, of communist North Korean hackers. If they had enough smarts to figure out how to do it right, they’d probably already be South Koreans. And if the American computer virtuoso-gone-hacker had an ounce of common sense, he would be writing programs for Microsoft instead of writing worms for the Russian mob.

I have to give the Nigerians a little credit, though. I have been getting scam e-mails from them for over ten years now, and at least they embraced their limitations early on.

“Look, guys, we can’t pretend we’re from their bank. They’ll never buy it. We can’t spell, and between all thirty-seven of us in this room, we can’t put together one decent sentence. Let’s just pretend we’re the son of a deposed king from right here in Nigeria. That way the grammar will be excusable. Hold my machete, Motumbo, I’m gonna start typing.”

As more and more of our every-day personal financial transactions are handled online, there is a cosmic leveling of the playing field when it comes to something as old-fashioned and fundamental as good grammar and spelling. The bad grammar of the hacker world is really quite handy. If the e-mails in your inbox were customers at a 7-Eleven, the bad grammar is the ski mask. See it, and you know something bad is about to go down.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to call my mom and thank her. Its cause a her learnin’ me right them hackers ain’t gonna git me!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

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