When you're a victim of theft, you know why Dante put thieves so low in the circles of hell.

It's just such a revolting thing than when it happens to you, at least attempted theft that happened to me recently.

Welcome to Free For All Friday here on the Council of Trent Mondays and Wednesdays.

We talk apologetics and theology.

Friday, whatever I want to talk about. And here's what I want to talk about. I wake up recently and come to see that I was the attempted victim of fraud. Now, I see these things happen from time to

time, but it was just really jarring for me. So first I wake up and I scroll through my phone and I see I've got a hundred text

messages. I'm like, what is going on here? It reminds you of that scene from, no, it's 100 text

messages from substack and from other places where my phone number has been used to try to get a subscription to something. And they

need a con and they're sending me a confirmation code. It's not like 100 text messages from friends saying

like, hey, how are you doing? That reminds you that scene from Zoolander. When the girl goes over

to Zoolander and says, you've been out for a week, a week, Matilda, I've only been out for a day. You know, a day spa. And he clicks on his voicemail message. Like, you have 1,200 new messages. It is a bit more than usual. One of these days, I'll just do a whole free-for-all Friday, a whole episode. And it's just, it's just Zoolander, Trent. Do you think there's more to life than being really, really ridiculously good looking? So I see all of these things. I'm like, what is going on here? And immediately I'm worried, okay, someone's doing something. The big thing I'm worried about is if someone goes and gets control of my primary email account. Is this like, you know, you've got an email account where you go and you, you know, you subscribe to things and you know, password resets, things like that. And it's like, oh, my goodness, so I go and I rush down the stairs, grab my computer, and I turn it on and upload it. And I'm just like, okay. Then I go to my email and it's already logged in. And I look around, log out, log back in. It's like,

okay, nobody changed my password. No one got to my, you know, don't get to my, my email address.

Like, okay, we're all right there. And it's like you're trying to like source through to see,

okay, what is the thief doing? What are you trying to do? You're trying to

attack my vulnerable elements here. Well, I guess my virtual vulnerable elements. I guess in a

physical fight, you go after the vulnerable elements on the human body. This person is trying

to come at me. What are they doing exactly? Why would someone just sign me up for

80 substack articles and memberships that require me to confirm it? So I go through and I start

looking for them. And then I go and I see one of the text messages says that you have a debit card spending that is over your set limit.

And I go and look at it and it's like, oh, I think it was for something.

It was like vapes or a patch, like a nicotine patch, but it's like for $1,000 worth.

And then there, and I was like, well, obviously I'm not spending that kind of money on that kind of stuff.

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