Eleven Days, Extortion and a Party

Eleven days without a post! This must be some sort of record, one that I’m not terribly proud of. I have my reasons, which I hope to share with you at some point (now is not the time).

There are a couple of things I’d like to mention now, however.

A few minutes ago I got a call from Canadian Tire Financial Services. I have a Canadian Tire Mastercard. They were calling to offer me, their “valued customer”, an identity theft assistance plan.

For only $6.95 per month (the first six months are “free”), if a criminal assumes my identity and steals my money, uses my credit and debit cards, drains my bank account, and generally wreaks havoc with my finances and records, I could call up Canadian Tire and they’d help me out.

My response to this phone call was an emphatic “no” and I explained why: this is practically extortion. It’s a protection racket.

Worse, for a financial services company, they are providing a service that gives them a vested interest in making sure identity theft remains a problem, because without identity theft no one would be motivated to sign up.

This is different than insurance, because they’re not offering to pay me back what someone steals from me, they’re just offering to help me straighten things out. This is different than burglar alarms, because the intent is not to stop a crime in progress, it’s simply to clean up the mess afterwards.

“I’m not going to live in fear of identity thieves,” I told the woman, and that was that (I don’t think my response was on her script).

The second thing I’d like to mention is Raise the Hammer’s Second Anniversary Party. If you’re in the area on Saturday, January 27, please stop by.