“I need you to check your credit card right now,” said AJ.
“My credit card?B-but why?I mean, I don’t use it on this computer,” she said looking confused.
“Please, Amelia, just do it for me.”She didn’t have to.Within seconds multiple warnings popped up on her phone regarding fraudulent charges.One was for nearly ten-thousand dollars.
“Oh, my God!Someone hacked my card,” she said covering her mouth.
“Take a minute and go call your credit card company.Freeze the card right now and go into the conference room to handle the rest of it.Don’t use your phone.Use the desk phone in the conference room,” said Tanner.
Wyatt slowly turned in his chair, as Amelia’s peers rushed to comfort her.He looked at AJ, Tanner, and Hiro, shaking his head.
There were warning signs all around them.Each person had a work phone and a personal phone, both of which were left near their computers as they stepped away to comfort Amelia.
All four of the men watched the screens, seeing glitches, glimpses of something happening behind the scenes that only they would notice.As men and women walked from the work space toward the small kitchen space, it increased, sending warnings up their spines.
“This is bigger than we thought.Much bigger and we need to find out what they’re looking for beyond the obvious of classified information.”
CHAPTER TEN
“Why aren’t we getting in?” asked the woman.
“It’s not as easy as you think,” said the young man.
Hell, he wasn’t a young man, he was still a boy.Nineteen.Or at least that’s what she thought he was.They were all just kids but genius kids picked off the internet in gaming sites.They’d figured out all the tricks inside the most difficult games in the world and learned to manipulate the games to their benefit.
She knew right away there was a better use for their talents.The uses in fact, were endless and she intended to exhaust every damn one of them.When they were no longer of value, they would be discarded.Permanently.
It all started when her own neighbor was stupid enough to click a link on her phone.What does your astrological sign say about you and dating?
“What kind of fucking idiot are you?” she yelled at her.
“Please don’t be mad.You’re the computer geek.Help me!I paid them $39.95 for the results and then it snowballed from there.”
“What do you mean?” she asked the woman.
“I mean, now they’re taking out $69.95 every month and I can’t find a way to stop it!”
Hers seemed easy to fix.You contact the credit card company and tell them it was a fraudulent charge, nothing that you agreed to.It worked but only after hundreds of dollars in payments.
Then her other neighbor complained about her security on her condo.She’d installed a small security system that was supposed to cost her only $49 per month.Eighteen months later, she was transferred for her job to another city.But the security company refused to cancel the service, saying she signed a six-year contract for the service.
“How can they do this?I didn’t sign anything.Everything was done online.”
As she looked into that issue, she discovered that there was a tiny box the user had to check in order to move forward with the security agreement.That box authorized the company to accept their signature for an agreed upon time frame for the service.
The print was so small, so lengthy, no one would read it.Not even her neighbor who was a para-legal.
But all of it got her to thinking.It’s all too easy.Companies were making millions, if not billions of dollars scamming customers.But she wasn’t a company.
Trolling the internet at night she discovered an online community that spoke of nothing excepting duping gamers and shoppers out of money.Hidden fees, hidden dimensions of products that were unrealistic, services never rendered, and so much more.
This was her retirement plan.Screw the 401k.Fuck the pension.
“Ma’am?What do you want me to do?” he asked snapping her from her own thoughts.
“I want you to keep trying and get into that fucking system.There are millions of dollars available to us.”
“Ma’am, I don’t think we can get to their budget distributions or their accounting sheets,” he said quietly.
