What do you do for a living?

[Master Of Annoyance]

The VGDC Forums (not counting the original Geocities site) have been around, albeit many different versions, for nearly 12 years.

With maybe an exception of a few, I would say it's likely the majority of us were still going through high school in the heyday of this place.

But now 12 years later, past high school and past college, what do we do professionally outside of surfing the web and visiting forums?

In my case, some of you may remember my threads about being laid off and lack of good luck in the job market.

Well, I've actually been fortunate enough to have a steady job now (making decent money too) for about the last year and a half, and it's actually an interesting job too.

I'm a fraud analyst. I monitor debit and credit card accounts for hundreds of banks/credit unions (thousands upon thousands of cardholders) across the United States and Canada (including Puerto Rico and even Aruba). I work for a fraud monitoring company that all these banks/credit unions contract out to.

Believe me when I say it's quite amazing just how much the general public does not know about the severity of credit/debit card fraud and what exactly these criminals can do, outside of what the media reports about things like the Target data breach and The Home Depot data breach.

Basically, I'm the guy on the other side of the phone you're talking to if your card issuer contacts you (really, it's us, the contracted agency). For those who have never had a call like this, I simply run down the list of recent activity, and you tell me yes or no to if you did each transaction. If you answer no to any one transaction, your card gets canceled, and you're referred to work with your bank/credit union. If you answer yes to all of them, then your card gets unblocked and everybody goes along their merry ways. Some are very grateful for the protection, others not so much because they're simply too ignorant to realize what we're doing and all they can think about is that they just got declined at Wal-Mart and they, for some reason, care deeply about what total strangers think of them. Again, that goes back to what I said before about the general public being kept in the dark.

The most incredible calls that I get, however, are the impersonators. Especially the ones that are calling from overseas and digitally altering their voices. The most hilarious ones are the obvious males with thick accents, from wherever it is the fraud is being attempted, digitally altering their voices to sound like an American female. The end result makes them sound like someone messing around with the pitch settings on Microsoft Sound Recorder, or Alvin the Chipmunk, or Gizmo from Gremlins, etc.

But as funny as those calls are, they're also deeply troubling. Not only did they just attempt a $7,000+ transaction using a counterfeited card at some electronics store in the Netherlands, but now they're calling us trying to impersonate the cardholder, and they know the cardholder's social security number, date of birth, phone numbers, and physical address.

Yeah.

It's a scary world out there.

[Ghenry]

A jobless, worthless, college student.

[Shervik]

graphic designer, also a bouncer.

[WeaponTheory]

Not a damn thing.

[Disk]

I'm a Temp, at a bank mail room. Working hard to get this job!

Been a Temp for the past 2 years, (five different jobs, before this current one.)

[Krahs]

I got fired recenently but i use to be eggman.

[CNS]

I work at a plastic molding factory. My job is collecting the parts made off of these massive presses (ranging anywhere from 33 to 110 tons) and packaging them to be shipped. I also have to supply the machines with material to keep them running. Tiny little pellets of plastic get turned into gears and whatnot. The company has a few big clients, like Black & Decker, Xerox, and Energizer. We also ship internationally.

I work 12 hour shifts 4 days a week, which explains my absence from the forums Monday through Thursday. If I am on, I'm just checking in on things from work on my phone. The job isn't too bad since the work itself isn't that hard. It can get hectic since we have a small crew and usually over 30 machines running at a time. I've been doing this work for just over 9 years now.

[Tracer Bullet]

I became a photo intern at a newspaper today, we'll see if it eventually leads to paid work.

[WeaponTheory]

(04-20-2015, 08:26 PM)Tracer Bullet Wrote: I became a photo intern at a newspaper today, we'll see if it eventually leads to paid work.

[Shervik]

(04-20-2015, 08:26 PM)Tracer Bullet Wrote: I became a photo intern at a newspaper today, we'll see if it eventually leads to paid work.

step 1: become bit by a spider
step 2: take lots of selfies
step 3: profit