Getting hacked and loving it?

First came the mystery shipment from Amazon. Then came the second mystery shipment from Amazon.

Then one of our credit cards was hacked. Then another of our credit cards was hacked.

Then we received a form letter from Johns Hopkins saying THEY'D been hacked and the bandits made off with my "name, medical record number, address, date of birth, Social Security number [SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER?!?!?], and "location and date of service related to your upcoming appointment." This truly chilling information was followed with a chirpy "The incident did not impact Johns Hopkins electronic medical records and no information was lost or deleted."

Oh goody.

But that's not all. A week or so later, a box arrived via the Postal Service (not Amazon) full of CBD gummies and pills. The package came from Florida but that's all we knew.

This story, by the way, has a happy ending. Sorta. Let's take it from the top.

Amazon shipment #1 arrives and it's full of unrelated stuff: Two kitchen blenders; a child's bubble toy and a bottle of bubble stuff to go with it; a cordless electric shaver; etc. etc. etc. There's no indication of where the box came from and no bill for the goods inside. I message Amazon and ask what the heck is going on.

Amazon, in effect, shrugs. Don't worry about it, they say. Just keep it.

Bu-bu-but, I respond, it's hundreds of dollars worth of stuff. Are you kidding?

Nope, sayeth Amazon, keep it. Give it to charity, give it to friends, use it yourself. Have a nice day.

Then Amazon shipment #2 arrives a day or two later and it too is full of unrelated stuff worth hundreds more dollars (a "high-frequency facial kit"???). I contact Amazon again. This time they take me a little more seriously. We'll start an internal investigation, they say. It won't happen again.

Bu-uh-uh-uh ... what about the stuff? Must be $600-$700 worth altogether.

Just. Keep. It.

Then the VISA accounts get hacked.

First it's Capital One. There's a charge for some $1,200 and, unaccountably, another for $1.00 to something called "BFLOHLP". Capital One notifies me immediately with a message to my phone. 'These aren't our charges,' I say. Capital One, bless their hearts, nullifies the charges and pursues fraud.

A day or two later, it's Chase. This time it's two suspicious charges at Lowe's totaling some $1,600, and a meal for $120 at a restaurant near Joint Base Andrews. I jump on the phone and Chase, bless their hearts, responds at once. The charges are nullified and a fraud investigation is initiated.

Then the chilling Johns Hopkins letter arrives. Then the package of CBD gummies.

We'd been asking ourselves whether these things were related, but now we're feeling downright paranoid. How could they not be?

Well.

First off, I'm pretty sure you, Dear Reader, have had a comparable experience or two. Such are the times we live in. We add credit card upon credit card, online merchant upon online merchant, and revel in the convenience while overlooking the security risks. My friends, you and I are paying through the nose for all that convenience. We are sacrificing what shreds of privacy we have left, exposing our identities to the hackers of Nairobi and St. Petersburg, then acting shocked -- shocked! -- when the inevitable happens.

Second, there's that closeness in time. The things that happened to me and Carol took place in the space of a few weeks and included hacking two unrelated VISA accounts. Surely these events were connected ... no?

No.

Correlation is not causation. That's Logic 101, though it's really hard for many of us to buy -- especially when the events come so fast and furious. But think about it. Carol and I never were billed nor paid a nickel for the hundreds of dollars worth of stuff we received, and kept it all. We suffered the inconveniences of credit card cancellations, the wait for new ones with new numbers, the dealing with repeating charges, etc. But both credit-card issuers were johnny-on-the-spot with notifications; both dealt with the apparent frauds; and neither charged us a sou.

In a way, Johns Hopkins even made it up to us.

At the end of the 3 1/2-page single-spaced form letter, Hopkins offered two free years of a service called IDX which purports to protect folks from this sort of thing going forward. Despite doubts -- what if IDX is a scam?!? -- I signed up.

The Hopkins hack even suggests clues to the mysteries of the double-VISA hack and the CBD-gummies shipment. Our identities were snatched from Hopkins a month before the you-know-what started hitting the fan. I know, correlation isn't causation. Still, I can't think of a better explanation.

So: Happy ending?

We got hundreds of dollars worth of stuff. We didn't request it but are finding uses for some of it. We gave our daughter one of the blenders. We are playing around with the high-frequency facial machine and the cordless shaver kit. The kids next door got a free bubble set. We're enjoying two free years of an identity-theft-protection service. And we never paid a blessed penny.

Now, anyone want some CBD gummies?

Frank S Joseph Author

P.S. TO DO JUSTICE still is set for October publication but certain issues have arisen. I'm not ready to blog about them yet but Watch This Space.