Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago @ 9:05 AM on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 under Blathering ·
Last night, I checked the mail and had three Netflix movies waiting for me! Excellent! Except for one small thing… I don’t have a Netflix account.
Huh. Immediately suspicious, I decided to dig in and see what I could find out. My first step, having opened the movies to see what they were (nothing worth watching, and no… no pr0n), I sat down at the laptop and brought up netflix.com. I’m not a member… well… I’m not a knowing member, so I had no idea what my username would be, much less my password. Normally, you can have instructions sent to the e’mail address on file, but I was confident that in my case, my own e’mail address wouldn’t be on file. However, they have a method of logging in if you don’t remember, or have access to the e’mail address you signed up with. It asks for the first name, last name and card number used to sign up with. Using my real first and last name, I started going through my credit cards to see which one had fallen into the wrong hands. I didn’t have far to go… I got a hit on the first try.
I started digging into the account, and while the name and address were mine, the phone number and e’mail address were not. I called the number, on the off chance that I’d find the person responsible, but instead reached a nice couple who (if they can be trusted) don’t have a Netflix account either. We talked for a while, and they’ll be monitoring their credit closely. I then called the credit card company and had the card canceled and a new one reissued. Finally, I called Netflix themselves and appraised them of the situation. They canceled the account and forwarded it to their fraud department, telling me someone would contact me in the next 1 to 3 days. Some scissors to the card and I’m all done.
I can’t help but wonder what kind of completely incompetent idiot steals credit card information to purchase goods online, only to have the goods sent to the rightful owner of the card! The mind, it boggles. It really worked out for me, b/c the proof of fraud was hand delivered to my mailbox, so I’m not complaining… but it begs a few questions… How did they get the card information? When did they get it? Could it be a diversion? Were they drawing my attention away from the real fraud? Or were they truly, just that stupid? There were no charges to any of my cards that I can’t account for, so if they’d planned other acts of theft, they hadn’t gotten to them yet. Still, I’ll be watching very closely.
This morning, I returned the movies I’d been sent in their very handy self addressed no-postage-necessary envelopes. Though it wasn’t necessarily the ideal of first experiences, my experience with Netflix was actually very very good. I might even consider signing up for an account.
In a final bit of humor, I did some searches for quotes about incompetence for the title, and one of the sites had a pop up ad for… you guessed it… Netflix!
Tags:Finances·Humor·Information Security·Stupidity