HACKED OFF
Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash
HACKED OFF
Part I
6:00 a.m.
We have control of your account. If you want it back, its two hundred…
This time the invasion came via an Insta message. So many ways they could get to you now, so many veins to tap and steal people’s gold, or, in Debbie’s case, her sanity. There was only so much a person should take, so she took no more.
Two hundred what? Rubles? Euros? Pounds Stirling? And it is IT-apostrophe-S! Where did you go to school?
She slammed the phone face-down on the kitchen table and hoped whoever sent the ultimatum felt the slap. If you were going to try and ruin someone’s day with blackmail, at least use good grammar.
Her son would say, “Just block and delete, bro,” with his eyes rolling so far back in his teenage head he could be having a seizure. Never engage. She knew the rules, but there had been so many alerts recently that her phone had started to behave like it was having a psychotic episode. Email notifications that her Tesco online shopping account had been hacked; surveys promising massive prize draws – if she just clicked on the link to install malware; unordered parcels in need of £3 postage paid before delivery, and relentless unsolicited phone calls from people who left depressed sounding messages asking, “Please add me to your WhatsApp.” Why, so they could become friends? Meet for coffee? Discuss how to solve global warming?
She was not going to be tortured any more – she’d told this little shit what she thought of him, her, or it. She just couldn’t tell anyone else she’d done it, because then there’d be the pitying ‘are we on the wrong side of the tech era?’ looks of concern.
This scammer had invaded her only private moment of the day. The thirty precious minutes when she got to mumble into the dawn chorus at the unfairness of it all. No one was listening, not even her small dog, who, instead of being man’s best friend, spent his waking hours maintaining one-sided enmity with the neighbour’s much larger hound through the garden fence.
“We’re more alike than you think,” she called after him before trudging upstairs for a shower.
War paint on, dressed and ready, she wrote one last missive to her new pen pal.
Go for it, wanker! I only set up the account because my kids told me I needed to engage in the digital world. As you can see, my fake life is full of images of bumble bees and a dog that thinks I’m his chef. Please, flood my feed with weight loss drugs or porn. My online ‘friends’ will love it. Give me a life of crime, hot sex and nefarious activity. It beats teaching and shopping in the reduced aisle in the dead of night.
Time running out – it was always running out – she put on the kettle for her familial housemates and called out, “Guys, I’m off. Get out of bed at some point during daylight hours,” before slamming the front door behind her.
7:10 a.m.
Ash stared at the response. He would love to look at bumble bees and dogs right now, much more than he would like to look at numbers, data, and profiles of strangers whose days were about to get more complicated simply because he’d developed an unhealthy relationship with gaming during puberty. He knew the next step, the line that needed to be cast with the ‘we believe you’ve been scammed’ worm. Get them to call the ‘helpline.’ He had a list to get through, at least twenty more people to cortisol-spike before the shift was over. His fellow colleagues (that was a stretch) looked as bored as he felt: chewing gum, fidget spinning, stuffing their faces with fast food that went down slow, like snails.
To Ash’s right, Mick was impersonating a police officer who was deeply concerned for the ‘victim’ on the line, while he picked at his ingrowing big toenail; to his left Selma was explaining – in the worst Swedish accent – that a ‘client’s’ Bitcoin investment was about to touch half a million if she just invested another £2k. She almost sounded the part, but didn’t look it, wearing dirty joggers and a sweatshirt. When she emerged from the bunker later, people would mistake her for a hobo not a cyber-criminal. They were all going to hell.
When he graduated from LSE, he never thought he’d be spending his nights in an underground lair with a bunch of human rats. But if you met his parents, you’d understand. They’d wanted payback on their ‘investment’ as soon as the degree was over. Failure, not an option. So, after several months of job searching and socially uncomfortable Sunday lunches with extended family, he took what seemed the best course of action: he lied. Everyone lies to their parents. Most people lie about drugs or calling in sick, he’d just taken it a step further, told them he had a job in the City, created a fake lanyard and borrowed money from dubious characters. That was how he came to be doing nightshifts here, below ground for those same dubious characters, surrounded by screens and the tap-tap-tapping of fingers running on the spot. They were modern day Oliver Twists wearing Nike instead of rags.
He still got the Tube to Bank each day; he just didn’t emerge from the bowels of the financial district until the sun came up. Proximity felt like the lie was less of a lie, maybe.
Hiding in plain sight was The Fat Controller’s bright idea. He never seemed to go home, just sat, pinstriped and impervious in his glassed office, half-reading a broadsheet, impersonating his heroes, Churchill and Bezos.
Pressure, always pressure.
He stared at the message he’d received back from the number ending 959. He could go to level three, tell her they had access to her bank accounts, that they would sell her data on the ‘Dark Web’, which was silly because this was the darkest web of all, but it usually worked.
She’d probably been standing at a bus stop looking at videos of bumble bees when she’d had her phone nicked. No two-factor authentication; easily cracked passwords – easy pickings. Sometimes he stopped randoms and told them how easy it would be to grab their phone from their back pocket or rip it out of their hands. He never made friends that way, but it was something at least. Doing his bit, before doing his bit.
“Three hundred numbers from the open Wi-Fi at Heathrow!” The Fat Controller pronounced as he waddled out his minions. “Who wants them?”
Ash lowered himself in his chair while five hands went up. The Fat Controller noticed. He noticed everything.
“Ash! You seem bored. Not enough on your roster? Good man!”
Good man. He looked at the messages from 959 again.
It beats teaching and shopping in the reduced aisle in the dead of night.
He took off his head set and stood up too fast, creating a ripple in the alternate reality of the lair. Grey faces turned, slowly blinking at disruption. Movement in stupor.
“It’s not break time,” said The Fat Controller.
“I need some air.” Numb faces frowned; subterranean creatures didn’t need oxygen to survive, just Doritos and instant coffee.
As he climbed the damp stairs to the surface, with The Fat Controller threatening to cut off his testicles, he knew he would rather lose them than spend another minute destroying people’s lives. In his hand he had a piece of paper with the number ending 959 scribbled on it. He didn’t know why. He also didn’t know why he had deleted it from the database. What was one person in a sea of victims? One person, that’s what it was.
8:45 a.m.
These kids weren’t interested in History. They were interested in selfies, of locating the person next to them. Paul, when asked why he was staring at his phone, said he was, “Looking up the history of the London underground, Miss.” Which was admirable, but it didn’t have much to do with Stalinist Russia.
“Discovering that Britain created the first underground transport system in the 1800’s?”
Nothing, not even a glimmer of interest. There seemed to be very little hope for this generation, and the fault was with her’s.
“Tiffany, stop taking selfies. Jesus Christ! What are you going to do when the Russians cut the cables?” They stared, baffled, ubiquitous false eyelashes and mogging males had no come back. “Speaking of Russians, can anyone tell me how many died in the Great Purge of the 1930’s?”
Everyone looked to little Boris – quiet, gentle, Humanity’s savour.
“I.9 million, Miss.”
“Isn’t that half the Snapchat followers you have, Tiffany?” Ah, bonding with The Youth, it was so depressing. What did some dictator with a handlebar moustache, who “looked like a paedo,” – thank you Josh – have to teach these almost adults? Who would likely be interviewed by an AI bot for jobs that would go to Alexa 5.1. But she pushed on, no breaking down on them today and stating the dystopian obvious. She’d save that rant for the garden later, matching the dog, bark for bark.
10.15 a.m.
What to write to someone you have never met but likely hates you anyway?
Ash sat – creased and in need of a shower – in Pret, watching the real world go by. Busy people with places to be, not places to avoid, going about their honest lives. Although, was anyone truly honest? There’d been the man in the suit who had called two different women and given the same amorous lines, just with different dates to get together, and the tourist family, who were pretending to enjoy themselves until the kids went to the toilet and the parents tried to change their flights back to Chicago.
His phone vibrated in the breast pocket of his suit. Could be The Fat Controller, could be his boyfriend, could be his mother asking if he was bringing that pretty Annabel for lunch again this week.
Hi, my name is Ash. I am the person with the bad grammer who attempted to scam you this morning. I wanted to say…
What did he want to say? Sorry? If she was remotely tech savvy, she would assume this was a scam and block and delete.
Five minutes later…
It’s grammar with an A, you idiot!
He sat upright, locked in on the words that, whilst insulting, were a lifeline, a bridge between his secret life and reality. A reality he didn’t notice, as the Pret employee grabbed his empty coffee cup with a dramatic tut.
Yep, sorry about that. I’m not as stupid as I seem. I’m actually an economics graduate who couldn’t get a job, until this one got foisted on me by some misadventures. For which I take full responsibility. I just wanted to say – I’m sorry. I’ve removed your number from the database, so that should help. You have my number now, my real number. You can report me if you like. I am so tired of being a dick, you know. You were my last straw or something. I’d like to make it up to you somehow?
10:45 a.m.
Debbie had seen the message come through but couldn’t be hypocritical and read it while lecturing the students about not living their lives online. She’d waited until now, during the soul-destroying experience of the staff room. Sitting on a flammable orange chair, she was finding it hard to come up with an amusing retort because Richard was regaling the room with his rugby injuries from the weekend. “But at least I’m still out there, getting in the cardio. Avoiding the old Ozempic.” Mary – the mental health welfare officer – hung on to the PE teacher’s every word like he was a motivational speaker instead of a dullard with bad breath.
Obviously, this was another scam but an intriguing one. She was quite certain she’d never heard this story on Radio 4. She could follow the lead, catch him in the act, document it, be a hero, a guest on Women’s Hour. “Debbie, how did you come to ensnare the ringleader and break up the cartel?”…
“Debbie!” called Richard over the muffled wall of her thoughts.
“Sorry, what?”
“You want to go the pub quiz tonight, or what? Theme’s Cold War. We know you never come to these things, but we need you if we’re going to win the wheelbarrow of booze.”
“That’s quite the invite.”
The wheelbarrow of booze… But socialising was still part of being human, just about.
“I mean we can’t Google it under the table. Barry tried that last week and got disqualified,” huffed Richard at the injustice of it all. “We need a human library – that’s you.”
“I’m flattered. I have several books on it here if you want to brush up.”
“A book?” Mary looked up from a TikTok video of her favourite celebrity doing a challenge involving semi-nakedness and jelly.
“No boring books, just you,” said Richard.
“Give me a minute.”
“It’s hardly a big decision.”
She blocked out his halitosis-infused waffle and typed.
So, a crisis of conscience… to what do I owe the pleasure?
The response was instant.
Guilt
Ah guilt, the great motivator for redemption, if it were true.
At this point I don’t care if you’re scamming me. I am so bored, surrounded by idiots who want to win a wheelbarrow of booze to numb their tiny minds. How do you propose to make it up to me?
What do you teach?
She stared at the question; it was a good question.
“What d’ya say? Be our Wikipedia tonight?” Richard bellowed in her face.
I teach History to a bunch of 17yr-olds who don’t believe in the past. It is simply a concept, like religion or the tooth fairy.
“I’ll be there. Now stop spitting hobnobs all over my Nazism lecture.”
Richard, offended by the word lecture, wiped his hands on his oversized thighs and told her she might want to get her hearing tested.
“And you might want to book in with a dental hygienist.”
“Come again?”
“Nothing. I’ll be there.” She caught Mary scowling at the prospect of middle-aged competition for Richard’s affections.
Debbie waited five minutes for a reply, but whilst she could see her scammer was typing, nothing came back. Ignoring the disappointment, she went back to the classroom.
5:00 p.m.
The seasons were changing, no getting away from that. Soon Ash’s afternoon bench in St James’s Park would be unnappable on. He’d enjoyed the summer months here, getting rest in before the night shift. His favourite squirrel, the one with the torn tail, came to sit next to him on the bench back.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to come by again, Ben,” he said, hand-feeding his companion nuts over his shoulder. “There’ll be sucker tourists over the Christmas season. Just look forlorn like you did with me. Do the big eyes thing.” The squirrel grabbed his shoulder, claws deep. “I know; life’s not fair.”
He’d worked so hard, got a solid 2:1, written to every bank, but he never got beyond the AI interview. Maybe it knew he’d been a liar on some level, but AI would never understand being born into a traditional family; could never empathise with growing up in an environment where the punishment for being yourself involved stoning. He told Ben all this, but Ben, who didn’t even know he was called Ben, had scarpered.
“You work too hard for that bank,” his mother said with pride when he hobbled home every other day. Soon he would have to break it to her that he was redundant, but by redundant he meant on the run, because judging from the barrage of messages from the ever-paranoid Fat Controller, it was not just his testicles he was coming for. Organ harvesting sounded nasty and somewhat final, as well as perfectly feasible given the corporation he was ‘working’ for.
You don’t just get to leave. I know where you live, you little shit. I will come and drag you out of your house and beat you in the street in front of your batshit crazy family.
Rage is a funny old emotion, the Yin to Fear’s Yang. Of course he was scared, but he was also thoroughly pissed now. You should be able to leave a job if you wanted without the threat of losing a kidney. His boyfriend had been harassing him too. Were they going to Paris this weekend? Would his work be putting them up in that five-star hotel he liked? Facials, sauna, fine dining. A lifestyle he’d become accustomed to because, it turned out, the lying extended beyond the family. Ash had a problem with the truth, and now Truth had been working out, putting on muscle and was coming to kill him. The only person who knew the first honest thing about him was a faceless history teacher in Oxforshire. If he couldn’t keep his boyfriend happy he’d lose him too. Ash shouldn’t be broke while The Fat Controller shopped on Savile Row. He shouldn’t live in fear of him. Ash knew his passwords, could get around his firewalls, he knew how to get his hands on the bastard’s cash. It was a crazy idea, but he might as well go out on fire with his internal organs burned rather than harvested. He’d need to use someone else’s phone though. No Ash, that’s a bad idea. And yet…
What do you buy in the reduced aisle at night?
I thought you had disappeared.
No, just sitting on a park bench contemplating my options.
There were none. He couldn’t go home; he couldn’t go to his boyfriend’s smelling like bunker and fear. It was rush-hour now and as he bent over his phone, he felt life passing him by with asphalt-stomping speed. What the hell.
Want to stop shopping in the reduced aisle at night?
The three dots of her response lingered. She was probably calling the police right now. He would.
How much do you know about Communism?
Not what he was expecting.
Lots. I got an A* in my History A level.
If only the mass of people brushing his knees without a glance knew that – with their disapproval, disposable coffee cups and boutique shopping bags, cheek-by-jowl with the toothless woman on the bench opposite, hands out asking for a pound for a hostel for the night.
I also know it doesn’t work, but then, what does?
Not scamming people for a living, I can tell you that much.
Everyone is scamming someone. Life’s a scam.
Oh dear, someone sounds on the edge of a breakdown.
Was he?
I don’t think I am, but I do need some agency. Now, about the reduced aisle… how would you like to not have to shop in it anymore?
Those three dots again, for an interminable amount of time. Then they stopped altogether. He had gone too far. Made sense. He had left the bunker, but he was still the same rat, about to use an innocent woman for his own gains, but she’d gain too, if they were clever about it. He had moved too fast, the fish had swum past the bait. He put his phone back in his breast pocket and looked up at the tree canopy. London was a great city, he’d miss it, miss Ben the squirrel, miss his bench, he’d even miss the toothless woman who looked at him as if they were from the same tribe, the ‘not quite part of it all’ tribe. But where the hell could he go now?
Vibration, probably another threat. Screw it, he’d throw his phone in the bin, or hand it to a mugger. Here, take it, but know there are people in there who will track you down and kick the shit out of you for owning it. Enjoy. He got up and wandered over to the bins. Should it go in recycling or general waste? It was general waste, like him. Another vibration, one last glance before he chucked it.
Fancy a pub quiz?
He laughed out loud. Yes, he fancied a pub quiz, something so throwback, so not part of this digital hysteria, this hypervigilant consumerist world. A pint, a game, something he could win.
I’m in.
*****
Sound engineer: Pete Monk
Copy editor: Will The Wordsmith Harvey
Music: Twoness by Franz Gordon courtesy of Epidemic Sound