A short PSA

Technology does exactly what you tell it to!

I was recently reminded of this by my email filters.

A while ago, I was being inundated by messages claiming to be from FedEx. There were sometimes 10 a day demanding immediate action, my package was missing, payment was due, Your package has been found, etc. etc. etc.

The problem was, at the time I hadn’t ordered anything. I hadn’t ordered anything to be delivered via FedEx for years.

So, rather than having my phone beeping incessantly while I was at work, I created a filter. At first the filter was specific to the one or two offending email addresses.

But the scammers kept changing their email addresses and so in a short time, my phone was beeping and booping again telling me that I had some business with FedEx.

Being clever, I changed the filter to simply look for FedEx, FEDEX, FedEX and several other variations in the From or Subject fields.

Blissful silence!

Then like most of us, I forgot those filters were still active. Even if I’d recalled that little detail, I’d have probably left them in place because as a rule I don’t use FedEx.

Flash forward to yesterday and, well, I was hoisted by my own petard.

Unfortunately, I am having to deal with FedEx over the computer that they’ve lost. Yesterday I filed the claim to have them pay for the unit.

This morning, in an idle moment I wondered where the emails a nice gentleman at FedEx told me I was supposed to get were.

Suddenly, I remembered email filters. I vaguely remembered something about FedEx scams and decided to check the email filtering system.

Sure enough, the FedEx filter was still there and running.

OOOOPPPSS!

I was fortunate that I hadn’t told the filter to delete the messages entirely. I’d only told it to put them in the trash, and since the trash deletes messages that are greater than 30 days old I was able to recover the claim notification I was looking for.

I’ve deleted the FedEx filter.

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This brings me to scammers, hackers, and other miscreants.

They do more damage, than just steal little old ladies retirements. That alone is cause enough for me to believe that scammers should be castrated with a rusty butter knife and an injection of something that enhances the pain response.

Hey, I want them to feel every exquisite bit of agony as that rusty butter knife saws through their scrotum. I also want to make sure that they don’t contaminate the gene pool any further. Hence the castration.

Scammers more far reaching disruptions are subtle. Even for those of us that don’t fall for the scam, we take steps to protect ourselves from the irritation and disruption their ploys inflict on us.

In doing so, we often experience disruption of legitimate business.

So as a PSA, Remember to check your blocked phone lists and your email filters on a regular basis. Usually the scam plays out and the scammers aren’t sending bogus emails after a few months. At that point you can delete your filters and be reasonably sure that the incoming FedEx or UPS email is legitimate.

Just Sayin…