It doesn’t matter how good your security system is if you leave your front door open.

I got a letter from a company I’d never heard of telling me that they’d been monitoring my credit for me and they thought that there was a problem. They said that it looked to them like someone had been using my credit. Their remedy – fill out this form and include my social security number and send it to yet another company I’d never heard of.

The bad part is that I suspect that a lot of people will fall for this trick.

This is an elaborate pfishing attempt. Instead of an email from a bogus company with a suspicious link, this was mailed. Instead of giving away my email password, they wanted my social security number. The letter was well written – there were no grammatical errors.

I could have the best credit protection that money could buy and it would mean nothing if I just handed over my social security number to these jokers. Now, this doesn’t even address the idea that we shouldn’t be using social security numbers for anything other than social security, but we do, all the time. That may be the topic of another post.

My first clue that something was amiss was that it was written to one of my aliases. I’d subscribed to something, perhaps a magazine, a long time ago and used a bogus middle initial. They used this one. The bad part is that I don’t remember who I started that with so I can’t track down who sold my mailing address. But what if it had been my real middle initial?

I suspect that older people will fall for this. They are often a little more worried about their security and more trusting of authority figures. They don’t know that they need to check things out for themselves. They are used to teachers and doctors and ministers telling them what to do. If my Mom were still alive she would have filled that out and not even questioned it.

Filling out that form is exactly the same as opening my door to a thief. I pay for home security. Every day when I leave I turn the alarm on. The smart thief wouldn’t even have to wait for a day when I forgot to turn it on. The smart thief would just knock on my door and be dressed like a UPS driver. I’d open the door and he’d kick his way in and it would be all over.

Failure to think for yourself or check things out on your own is the same as leaving your front door open.

Be smart. Question everything. Don’t trust authority just because it is authority. Read the rules for yourself. Read the fine print. Read the Bible for yourself. Don’t agree just for the sake of agreeing, and certainly don’t take my word for it.

Any person who expects you to take what they say without question is highly suspect.