I recently got a call from Chase left on my answering machine telling me to call an 800 number and have my credit card available to authenticate myself. The trouble is, they didn't authenticate themselves. Anyone could have made that call to me and if I did what the call said, I would be giving my credit card number (and probably the date, secret code and every else they asked me) to a bad actor. I authenticated them by dialing the number on the back of my card, but I worry that there will be a smart confidence man who will figure this out before the rest of the world figures out how to stop leaving openings.

I also received two calls about my "Virgin lottery territory" piece that Buzz Aldrin liked. Two other people called because they received checks from a "Virgin Lottery" that didn't cash, they searched for that on the web and my article and phone number came up. Never mind that my article dealt with the 17th century lottery that helped fund Virginia colonization, they thought I might know something about modern fraud.

I had a similar experience when I missed a payment on a loan. The bank used an automated system to call me and ask me to call a random 800 number and talk about my loan.

I called the bank's security department, and the woman there was reasonably intelligent, but couldn't find the number in her 'book' either (I'd already searched the web site to see if it was 'one of theirs', but of course they didn't list it.)

She connected me to the guy who ran the callback program, but I couldn't seem to get him to understand that I wasn't going to call a random phone number and give them the kind of information that would be useful in impersonating me to a lender.

He kept talking about how they wouldn't share my information unless I proved who I was, but didn't see why I wouldn't prove it unless they proved who *they* were.

I gave up after about fifteen minutes.

Similarly, after I moved I received a voicemail from someone identified only by first name at E*Trade asking me to verify my account address by sending a fax of my account information, password, and driver's license to a random fax number.

I was convinced it had to be an identity-theft scam. So was the first CSR I talked to at E*Trade. It took nearly an hour of being transferred from one department to another to figure out that it was legitimate.