Stolen Credit Card and LinkedIn. DHS Spies on Immigrant Social Media.
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
Last month, I got an email telling me it was time to pay my spouse’s Wells Fargo card.
I knew there was a problem immediately, because we aren’t using that one lately, and it was frozen and in a sockdrawer.
They said $30 was owed, so we logged in and saw that someone charged “Gold Membership” and the Merchant Name was “LINKEDIN.COM” in Pennsylvania.
Apparently, this is common. They’ll make a small charge that could easily be overlooked and the merchant doesn’t really matter much, then later when they know they have a working card, they’ll start doing something like the $2,000 of cryptocurrency they hit Jamie Zawinski with after charging some small fees for video gaming services.
His bank stopped the cryptocurrency charges, but not the nuisance transactions. We informed the bank, thankfully, before more damage was done. They reversed the charges, shut down the account, and opened a new credit card account, and sent a letter out stating there’s nothing else we need to do at this time.
I was trying to figure out what exactly a LinkedIn Gold is, and from what I can tell “You can pay them so you have a stupid gold ‘in’ on your profile.” so you can tell people you’re like, super duper cereal about LinkedIn, or some dumb thing like that.
Who even uses LinkedIn?
My sister-in-law, who has a ton of debt got “orca fat” since I saw her 5 years ago, and has bags under her eyes.
She uses an old picture of herself on LinkedIn from before. She’s constantly on it adding “Letters” after her name, like she’s accomplished things. (Other than needing four jobs because of the debt.)
At this point the letters are longer than the name, and most of them are “Your guess is as good as mine.”
It’s beginning to look like Arnold Rimmer walking in wearing his dress uniform and a collection of medals “two years long service, four years long service, six years long service…” and so on and putting “B.S.C. S.S.C” after his name for “Bronze Swimming Certificate, Silver Swimming Certificate”.
But even she doesn’t have the gold “in” logo. Maybe she should get extreme and show Microsoft that she’s Super Duper Cereal about LinkedIn.
I’m not big on Social Media, myself.
The Department of Homeland Security is now “proposing” new immigration forms that demand to see Social Media handles of all immigrants when they ask for a green card, citizenship, and a bunch of other things.
The proposal suggests that they could look at LinkedIn to verify that you’re really working where you say you do. I was just commenting the other day about how stupid and absurd that is.
Anyone could make a totally fake LinkedIn profile, and almost all of them are fake to some degree.
Likewise, there’s a whole list of things they want to harvest from these profiles, like who you associate with, what you say about the government or specifically, Trump, and is there evidence you’re posting of committing criminal activity, etc.
There’s so many reasons to ditch Social Media, and so few reasons to have it.
We’re living in a country where the Constitution has essentially been suspended, and the President’s position is “I’m the fuckin’ President. Who will stop me?”
And the answer, apparently, is nobody.
If you’re a brown person with a tattoo, they can just throw you out using the “Alien Enemies Act” and you end up in a prison in El Salvador. He threatened to start disappearing Americans there again yesterday.
Trump also confirmed that El Salvador President Nayib Bukele will visit the White House in the next few weeks, and that the two leaders will discuss the possibility that the Central American country will begin jailing imprisoned American citizens.
“I love that,” he said about the idea.
“I think if we could get El Salvador or somebody to take them, I’d be very happy with it, but I have to see what the law says,” he continued. -Trump, as quoted by The BBC
Some people are commenting on the government’s proposed regulations. Perhaps they’ll find out what El Salvador is like.
I asked MinceR in Techrights if he had written to the “Gypsy King” of “Orbanistan” (Viktor Orban of Hungary), and he said “I’m not even sure he knows how to read.”
Well, America has a Gypsy King now, and ours is bigger. 😛
Trump doesn’t know how tariffs work, but he’s got a pen and a phone, and is perfectly happy to lay waste to our stock markets and retirement accounts, and make everybody poor on a whim. So there’s that.
Sadly, Congress is not deadlocked and there’s about 10 Democrats in the Senate that he’s either threatened with El Salvador or has something on that are also toeing the line.
I doubt Chuck Schumer is cut out for the CECOT “Zero Idleness Policy”, so he’ll continue to be “congratulated” by Trump for being “a very smart man”. â–ˆ