It was a Monday evening when Mum was taken from the rest home to the hospital, and one of only a handful of days this year on which I hadn’t been to see her. The last time she’d been in, she suffered a stroke in her hospital bed. She was seriously ill again.
My hospital visits were interrupted a week later by what seemed at the time like a vicious two-day flu, but may have been some form of exhaustion on my part. I came right and, after 45 minutes searching for a park, arrived at her bedside again on a Thursday.
I had been there five minutes when one of Mum’s doctors appeared with a consent form. They needed to perform a painful and potentially risky diagnostic procedure and they needed my approval. I read the form, listened to the doctor and – what else could I do? – signed it. I held her while it was done and she moaned in pain. Then I went home and got bank-scammed.
The text message came through on my desktop and on a better day I’d have noticed it came from an ordinary mobile number and not a four-digit “short code”. But at the time, it looked enough like one of the legitimate text alerts the bank sends and it said I had registered a new device on my bank’s mobile app and to call “immediately” if not. I dialled the 0800 number.
The die was cast when the phone was answered. What should have been a red flag – getting through to a bank call centre straight away! – triggered a flood of reward chemicals in my brain. I was strung out, here was another problem, and here was someone who could help. A well-spoken man with an English accent talked me through the supposed problem, purported to update me about an illicit login and allowed me to tell him too many things.
Then I allowed a remote login to my computer, for a “malware scan”. It was an unfathomable thing to do and a good example of the way – as Nigel Latta would point out in his You’ve Been Scammed TV series a few nights later – technically able people can be vulnerable to scams. I’d allowed such access before, to troubleshoot a voice-over-IP connection. I knew how this worked.
The call ended suddenly and the spell broke when I tried to call back. There was no such number. The world came crashing down. I checked and the scammer had already got into our banking, consolidating all our money into one account. I quickly changed the password. But Mum’s banking was on my computer, too, and the text confirmation to change her password was going through to the phone at her bedside in hospital. The nurses’ code of practice didn’t allow them to tell me the confirmation code.
The wait for a callback from the bank’s fraud line was the longest hour of my life.
It came in time. We saved Mum’s money. The bank rep told me they were swamped with calls from people in a similar position that night and it seems likely the scammers’ strategy is to attack so many people at once that helpdesks are jammed. I knew I still had problems – they’d got into my password manager – and I was up until 4.30am doing my best to fix everything. The following days were a blur of fear, anxiety and shame. I changed passwords over and again, ran checks, reinstalled my operating system.
A few days later, the doctor called. They couldn’t do any more. I rode with Mum back to the rest home and we gathered around her for the day. But in the end, deep in the night, it was just me and her. I was holding her hand when she went.
