Warning: angry rant below
So I lost lost the Username and Passwords to all my 3 credit bureau accounts, and also the email account, this appened like earlier this year, (or maybe last year not sure… anyways…). I didn’t bother resetting at the time since I didn’t need to get a credit card or loan or anything.
But today I decided to reset those accounts to check my credit. So I started with calling Experian to try to reset the account. So right away, I’m already mildly annoud that a fucking automated voice Bot took the call and then on top of that, they fucking played a fake “keyboard typing” sound to mimic a human typing on a keyboard after every response 🤦♂️, like yo I know its a bot, stop with this BS. So it asks what I need help with, “accessing account”, okay it asks for SSN and zip code, okay gave that, then this bot just sent a reset to my email, WHICH I DONT HAVE ACCESS TO!!!, okay no problem, I’ll just talk to a person, “talk to a representative”, okay this is the most infuriating part, bot says “I’M SORRY, I’M ONLY ABLE TO DO THAT IN LIMITED CIRCUMATANCES” (paraphrased, I don’t remember the exact wording)… excuse me what the fuck, this audacity of this fucking bot, I say it again, but the only 2 options are “continue” with the automatic self-help system, or “end call”… MOTHERF****R 🤬🤬🤬
Jesus Fucking Christ, who gave these stupid “Credit Bureaus” their authority?
I see a future of:
“Hello 911, please send an ambulance, I’m dying.”
Bot: “Sorry, not blood detected, unable to dispatch an ambulance”
dude was having a heart attack, of course no blood was detected
Sounds like a ceo problem
Yeah, COVID was an excuse for a lot of companies to kill their customer service departments and make their automated systems even worse.
How? I can talk to strangers on a phone at home.
I mean, I technically could, but that’s my personal version of hell. But, like, somebody else could.
Hypothetically, yes, but during covid was when a company had to truly learn the work-at-home model. Some succeeded, some failed, but the reality is it was an excuse not to try. Automated is cheaper, and laying off employees because a pandemic has closed doors is a great excuse.
“I’m sorry, due to an abundance of caution we are unwilling to reopen the offices and do not have the infrastructure to have you work securely from home, so we’re going to have to furlough everyone until further notice”
Then they have a month testing the automated system and hit “good enough” by their standards so then they say the furlough becomes a layoff and everyone loses.
You know what the secret is? Just start speaking nonsense and it will get confused. Lean heavy into a regional accent as well so it can’t understand.
Also just press random keys that aren’t in the list of options it gives you.
A lot of them just hang up on you when they get confused.
Yeah I’ve had that happen, too.
Still my first method because it works most of the time.
I tried pressing “0” “9” or anything, the fucking bot hanged up on me
“Thank you for calling, Goodbye” NOOOOO I WASN’T DONE WITH YOU, YA F***KING BOT
FTC complaint here I go, oh I hope the FTC does something before Jan 20, cuz the new commission chair aint gonna help.
“Eeyup, ars thar doin’? Ad be reyt, but av lost me notes of me password— tin tin tin”
(This was an attempt at transcribing someone saying in a heavy Yorkshire accent: “Hello, how are you doing? I would be okay, but I’ve lost my notes of my password. It isn’t in the tin”. (I had to squeeze in “tin tin tin” to this somehow because that’s one of my favourite mini jokes about heavy Yorkshire accents.)
Iirc there’s a site out there that gives pretty specific instructions on how to reach an actual meatbag in customer support for tons of companies.
I’ve found it less and less useful over the years.
Caused by the site or by the phone lines?
Probably the companies themselves. I work remotely, and our company provides software phones to remote workers as needed. 99% of the time I don’t need one, but there have been a few times where I’ve needed one for various reasons. So I have one temporarily set up for myself, usually for just a few days. Just about every time I have done that I get random voicemails from frustrated customers who are trying anything to just reach a human.
I heard that saying fuck over and over again will get you to a real person
I tried that recently on a call to, I believe, the bank. It ended up just disconnecting the call. Clearly they know about this trick.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” -Bot
Same with FedEx. It eventually hung up on me.
You should consider a password manager.
I did have one. I forgor the master password 🙃
Yay for Bitwarden Bulletproof security!
Reseting Google to get access to the email doesn’t work either, Google says “Unable to verify that this account belongs to you” 🙃
(Now, for my current Bitwarden, I have emergency access set up and the account for the trusted contact written on a piece of paper in a drawer. The old one is lost forever.)
Yeah, this is why I’ve been slow moving over to a password manager. A single cliff-like failure point scares me.
Yea, look into “Emergency Access” feature on Bitwarden, you set up a emergency contact that can request access, wait out a timer (that you set), then after the timer access is granted.
I could write down the login info to the account of the emergency contact in plain text and even if someone finds it, I can still deny them access before the timer runs out, but it also allows me back in if I forgot the main account’s master password.
Did you not write it down? I write mine down and put in the safe.
I put mine on a Post-It on my monitor with my other passwords
If your home threat model involves people breaking in and having physical access to your personal computer, then you have bigger problems than them getting your passwords. There’s really no reason you can’t just write them down.
Precisely. Once they reach the dungeon, they’ve already passed all the really nice stuff anyway. Besides, at this point it’s easier to just hack my accounts the old-fashioned way.
You laugh but it is often much easier for people to understand physical security especially for older people. They can get a small notebook and then guard it.
It’s funny because it’s true.
I don’t have a safe to put the password in, and I’m too skeptical of my family to just have it in plaintext.
But now I found a solution, a compromise, instead of writing the actual master password, I paid for premium so that I can set up emergency access and make my secondary account as the trusted contact, then put the username and password to this secondary user on a piece of paper in plain text and even write “Bitwarden Emergency Access” on it.
Even if a snooping family member got it, they wouldn’t be able to access my vault, I set the timer to at least 2 weeks, and I check the emergency contacts webpage every few days to make sure the timer hasn’t started ticking. If I ever get an email, or check the page and see the emergency access request being made, I’ll know I have to confront someone.
And meanwhile, this also protect me in case I forget the master password to the main account, or like have anmesia or something. The drawer is a prominent visible place, so even if I lose my memory, I’d probably be looking for clues and find the paper with the log in info. Then wait 2 weeks and voila!
I love the Emergency Access feature, what a wonderful Idea! I wish I used it the first time.
It sounds like you have this sorted now, but I will share my tip anyway.
My master password was a randomly generated pass phrase of a few words, such as what you can generate with Bitwarden’s password generator set to “passphrase”
Using an example I’ve just generated with that tool, if I had decided on a master password of “Daily-Exorcist-Nappy-Cornmeal”, then I would generate a few more passwords and write those down too. So I’d have a list that might look like this:
snowman
daily
uncanny
backer
exorcist
thinner
showoff
nappy
cornmeal
nifty
(I have bolded the words belonging to the actual master password from my example above, but obviously that’s not how it’d be written down. To remember that the passphrase has the words separated by hyphens, you could draw dashed lines around the list, like a decorative border. Here, I have also written words all in lowercase, even though the password has uppercase. (Though I would advise keeping the passphrase in the correct order, as I have in this example, because it’s easy to pick out the correct four words from a list like this, but harder to remember the right order for them).
I don’t have a safe either, but writing things down like this felt like a sufficient level of security against snooping family and the like. Though like I say, it seems like you’ve resolved this differently, so this is more for others who may stumble across this than for you.
I agree with you that the emergency access feature is great. A couple of years ago, my best friend died and I ended up being a sort of “digital steward” of all his stuff, because I was his tech guy and he had shitty passwords that I couldn’t convince him to change. In the end, his laziness meant we got to preserve some digital mementos that would otherwise be lost (such as his favourite decks on Magic:Arena). At the time, I was using a personal system to generate and remember passwords, and I was shaken to consider how much would be lost if I died. I feel far more at ease now with the Emergency Access feature from Bitwarden Premium (I also like being able to use Bitwarden for 2FA codes). I’m sorry that you had the unfortunate experience of being locked out of your stuff, but I’m glad you were able to secure yourself such that you’re protected from that in future.
I just keep my master password written on a piece of paper tucked into my wallet.
That… seems insecure…
I hope nobody just steal the paper and your entire digital identity.
Don’t forget to contact your senators & representatives. This is what seniors deal with in all aspects of their lives. We gotta not think that other people will fix these problems cause no one is doing shit but allowing it to happen.
