[Anonymouse]

Not sure where this should go; mods, please feel free to put it where it should be if I've made a mistake. Hardly my first today.

This afternoon I nearly fell prey to a scam. Allegedly there was something about my Amazon account, but I thought the requirements were a bit dodgy, i.e. having to install some app I'd never heard of (LemFi), ScreenConnect and Western Union.

DO NOT INSTALL THESE, EVEN THOUGH, ACCORDING TO REVIEWS, THEY'RE LEGIT APPS. SCAMMERS ARE USING THEM.

Luckily Barclays was on the ball, and a rep (genuinely from Barclays, we did security checks) rang me up to check the two transactions I'd tried to make. I realised how dodgy this all was, and asked her to stop my cards as a precaution - which she has. The transactions have not been made. As a further precaution I'll go to Barclays tomorrow and ask about it.

Taking a photo of my passport? That was the first alarm bell. Then the bombshell, which set off louder alarm bells: entering my debit card number, which like a prat I did. But still the transactions failed. Whew.

The bloke (who sounded Indian) was vague about why I was making these money transfers - which was when I realised this was a scam, and told the rep. It's true that unusual activity was detected by Amazon - I've changed my password - and that's because apparently the IP address was in the States.

I know precisely one person there: my cousin. We haven't spoken since he went to the States decades ago. I doubt we ever will, we're not close.

I've cancelled my passport as a precaution; I'll get a new one when I get my new cards (you can no longer pay for passport photos in cash. Bit annoying). The phone numbers the scammers used, I've blocked and forwarded to 7726. I'll go down the cop shop and report this; I think it's a legal requirement.

And I have, of course, uninstalled the apps. I'm not totally daft.

Well, not totally.