ENEMY ACTION

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”

- Goldfinger

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I saw the James Bond film GOLDFINGER in about 1965 with my brother. We both had a newspaper stand down town on Saturday afternoons in what was once Grey Street. Downtown newspaper stands were very sought after as with 6 O'Clock closing of the pubs, the drunks would buy newspapers (The Evening Post) and tip generously - sometimes a 2 bob piece or a half a crown for a 4-penny paper. Great. We used to have pockets bulging with coin.

We lived in Vogeltown so on this evening we took the Brooklyn bus up to the Brooklyn picture theatre (I can't remember the name of it but it's not the more recent trendy one there). I remember where we caught the bus - the corner of Willis Street and Manners Street and what we had for tea - a crappy fish 'n' chip meal from a Chinese takeaway there by the bus stop. Chinese takeaways didn't make fish and chips as well as the Italian and Greek shops did.

We were going to see the new Bond film - Goldfinger which seemed pretty good at the time and we walked home which was a lot safer then for kids with pockets full of money to do at night.

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Anyway - enemy action!

We've had our credit cards hacked again.

This happened first a few months ago when we had a lot of hotel charges from Amsterdam put on our account - about $12,000 worth. After a couple of months of hassle we had all charges reversed and the credit cards changed. We had to change all automatic payments registered on the card and set up new accounts for any occasional purchases like Uber, Netflix etc - a real hassle.

Today I saw a phishing email purportedly from Apple announcing a withdrawal - I didn't click on it for either confirmation or to unsubscribe and instead went to the bank's website to check transactions. Sure enough there were many transactions to Apple in multiples of $51.99 and $103.98 that totalled about $5000. Bastards! I immediately contacted the bank and have had the cards cancelled again.

I'm going to have to go through the dispute process again and hopefully will get all the charges reversed. I've cancelled the Apple account - we've had $1.49 a month paying Apple for iCloud storage. I think this is a rort so I've dumped it .... but ..... get this. The last time this happened and we had to cancel our credit cards we had to reinstate the new credit card details with suppliers we wanted to continue with - energy company, Lotto, Airlines etc but didn't change it for Apple. Surprise surprise - Apple got the new details anyway and the $1.49 per month storage payment went on regardless. I should have done something about this.

Checking it out today I discovered that Apple (Apps, iTunes etc) have, via Apple Pay, an arrangement with banks whereby they get automatically updated of any credit card changes. WTF! I contacted the bank again and asked them to delete any connection between our cards and Apple Pay and to also drastically reduce the credit limit on our cards - something that I should have done before.

I'm going to wean myself off using credit cards as far as I'm able and have removed all automatic payment arrangements already. I'll have to see about paying for casual purchases (tickets, Lotto etc) via internet banking ior revert to cash.

I think that THE CURMUDGEONLY LUDDITE has a point don't you?