Bunco

Whatever happened to the word "bunco"? We who used to watch Dragnet were used to hearing the word when Jack Webb as Joe Friday would open a show by saying, "…my partner Frank Smith and I were working the day watch out of Bunco…" According to www.dictionary.com a bunco, or bunko (short for bunkum) is a swindle or confidence game.

Does anyone even use the word "swindle" anymore? Nowadays I think the words bunco and swindle have been replaced by the words "scam" and "con."

The Internet is still in its wild and wooly phase, where anything is possible and no one seems to have perfected a way to maintain some sort of control over the cretins who come through your monitor from god-knows-where, trying to extract money illegally from you. Everybody remembers the Nigerian e-mails where some lawyer in Lagos, Nigeria tells you somebody died leaving you $2,000,000, and all you have to do is send him $5,000 and he'll make sure you get it. Are those still being sent? I haven't seen one of those in a few years, although I heard just recently about several people who have fallen for it, losing thousands of dollars in the process.

The other bunco/con/scam is "phishing," where some crooks send you an official looking e-mail supposedly from your bank or Paypal or eBay saying there has been an attempt to get into your account, so send us your password, credit card numbers, etc., and we'll make sure it doesn't happen again. Has anyone fallen for that one?

You don't need the Internet to pull a scam. In 2003 Sally and I got a phone call on a Monday from our credit card company asking if we'd authorized some suspicious payments and we hadn't. The week before our son's wedding someone had wiped out our checking account. We went to our bank and reported it and got our money back immediately. We told them what we thought happened. Sally had gone with a friend to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. The waiter had taken her credit card, kept it for what Sally thought was longer than necessary, and then two days later the charges started hitting our account from other states. At the time we were so glad to get our money back we didn't really think much about what could be done about it. The bank didn't seem all that interested, nor did the credit card company. I'm sure it happens so often that they probably just chalk some of it up to the cost of doing business, and of course they add those charges right back to you in forms of increased service fees. So we get scammed by crooks and no one asks who was at fault, and then we end up paying extra for it.

A couple of weeks ago I heard on the local news about a Salt Lake City Quizno's sandwich shop. About 30 customers complained that after they used their debit cards to buy lunch unauthorized charges showed up on their credit card statements. At least the customers knew where the scam originated. Some employee of that particular Quizno's either sold the credit card numbers or used them himself. You don't need the Internet to get ripped off; you can get it by buying lunch.

I wonder if this has happened to anyone else: Last year before my son's birthday my wife bought him an iPod from Amazon.com. While ordering it she read that if she opened up an Amazon.com Visa account and have them put the items she was buying on that card, she could get free shipping. She signed up for the card, never intending to use it. She thought, "I'll get the card, I won't activate it, then when I pay it off in one lump sum I'll cancel the card." She didn't think much of it until she got a credit card statement showing that someone had placed e-trades to a stock broker in the UK on our card. She made some phone calls, signed a statement that the charges weren't made by her, and we never lost anything, but no one accepted responsibility. Amazon.com said it wasn’t their fault, Visa said it wasn't their fault, so how did someone get the credit card number since except for the initial charge for the iPod, the card was never activated? That's just bunco!Ciao for now.