By the same token, I have no doubt that I am sometimes a victim of the little beasties that track your browsing and shopping habits

Bowser, I’m disappointed, you’re my gold standard for paranoia about personal privacy, my canary in the coal mine privacy muse.

But I can’t really criticize. Those phishing schemes are clever, and they work hard to be convincing. After years of scamming, Darwin guarantees that the ones still in business are damn good at it, and the others are in the slammer.

I lost two days this week to a nasty virus infection (in my computer). Sure, I’m a smart geek, I’d never click on an email attachment, oh nooooooo. But the virus got in somehow, and it was an email attachment; somewhere, somewhen, I screwed up.

It’s humbling.

10 minutes later realized it was an auto-pay, and had to cancel the card. No one had tried to use it in the intervening time.

LOL, you are right about Comcast. The only reason that crossed my mind was the casual way the inquiry was treated by their rep. She was dismissive about the whole thing once she found I was not locked out. I would have expected her to at least say that it would be reported.

The one thing I’d have done differently (or maybe you did and didn’t mention it) would be to try logging in to the account to verify the claim. There’d be no risk to you to try that, assuming you used your bookmarked “http://sz0130.ev.mail.comcast.net” address (me-too@comcast.net). That would settle it right away.

“…mischief by Comcast”? That’s a puzzler, Frank. Not that I trust Comcast–they throttle my video streams from their competitors but not their own, so everybody else’s video suddenly looks crappy after five minutes. That’s one big reason I prefer to download video rather than stream. But why would Comcast need to run a phishing scam on you? They already can get into your account and read your email and intercept your credit card numbers and shake you down six ways from Sunday without lifting a finger. Not that I have reason to think they do that, but I’m sure they have better ways to make mischief for you than an email scam.

Nah, that at least I wouldn’t worry about. Better to worry about things like the failure of “net neutrality” legislation, the absence of which lets Comcast trash my video streams with impunity to punish me for doing business with their competitors. Let’s focus on the crimes we know about.