ID Ledge

Heather Quinn

Editor of ID Ledge

About

I'm 45, and I work as an HR manager in the Steele Creek neighborhood of suburban Charlotte, North Carolina. My home office is a converted spare bedroom: corner desk, whiteboard with an account-monitoring checklist, and a shredder on the floor beside the printer that has gotten more use in the last four years than I expected when I bought it.

In 2022, two things happened within about eight weeks that changed what I pay attention to.

The first: my father, who is 72 and trusts the phone more than he should, got taken by a fake IRS call. The caller said there was a tax debt and demanded payment in gift cards. He sent nearly five thousand dollars before anyone could reach him. The IRS never calls demanding gift cards. That is one of those facts you tend to learn after it costs you something. The recovery process involved a police report, an FTC filing, and a lot of phone calls to federal fraud lines that mostly ended with a sympathetic voice explaining there was nothing more to be done.

Two months after that, my own credit card got skimmed at a gas pump and used for over a thousand dollars in online furniture I had not ordered. My neighbor Rochelle, a retired bank teller who had spotted a skimmer on a pump near her old branch the year before, had already told me which local stations had tap-to-pay terminals and suggested I use them. I had filed that away and kept swiping anyway. When the alert came in, I called Marguerite first. She is a longtime friend from the neighborhood book club who works in mortgage lending and had been nudging me to pay closer attention to my credit report for years before any of this happened. She stayed on the phone for forty minutes while I walked through the dispute process.

After that I started paying for identity protection services with actual intention: watching what the alerts fire on, logging response times, and reading the cancellation terms before I needed them. My coworker Deon found the IdentityTheft.gov checklist in the first week while I was still trying to figure out which bureau to call first. I've used that site more than I expected to. The FTC forms it generates actually come in handy.

Four years into this, my formal training is still in HR. What I have in place of a cybersecurity credential is a tested set of subscriptions across my own accounts and my parents' accounts, a three-ring binder of dispute letters and monitoring notes on the bookshelf, and a clear picture of what paid monitoring realistically does and does not do. They catch fraud earlier. They do not prevent it. I try to say that clearly every time.

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