Officer Jack came to my door in street clothes–a tall, friendly, good old Irish cop with a strong handshake. He sat on the couch and took everything down on a yellow pad.
Soon I was talking live with the voice on the tape. She asked me if I’d applied for a credit card recently. I laughed. I haven’t applied for a credit card since Jimmy Carter added a credit-card surcharge in a desperate attempt to make it look like he was doing something to fight inflation.
“The transposed numbers,” she said. “That’s Nigerian fraud.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The phone voice turned out to be calling from a bank in Ohio. She said there was a fraud ring operating out of Nigeria; they send people here to befriend Americans, then get their vital statistics–social security numbers and whatnot. They especially like to get to know people who work in banks, she said, who might have access to the social security numbers of people with a lot of money. And then they pass the information up to the ringleader, who takes out credit cards in those names. On my bogus application to her bank, my home address was in Salt Lake City. Probably a drop box, she said.
He never did. Once when I told him stories of all the employees I’d fired for stealing, he shook his head and said, “If I going to steal, I steal from Donald Trump. I don’t steal from a man who struggles like me.” Another thing that made him better than 80 percent of the others was that he always showed up, eventually. One night during a blizzard, when I was sure I would be stranded, he came trooping through the deep snow. The one time he didn’t show up, he called from an el platform at one in the morning and apologized profusely.
Officer Jack took it all in quietly and finally said, “You know, you’re not the victim. They haven’t done a thing to you. The credit-card company is the victim. In a way, it’s their own fault. They’re so willing to give credit cards away.”
