CHAPTER TEN
“Why aren’t we getting in?” asked the woman.
“It’s not as easy as you think,” said the young man.
Hell, he wasn’t a young man, he was still a boy.
Nineteen. Or at least that’s what she thought he was.
They were all just kids but genius kids picked off the internet in gaming sites.
They’d figured out all the tricks inside the most difficult games in the world and learned to manipulate the games to their benefit.
She knew right away there was a better use for their talents. The uses in fact, were endless and she intended to exhaust every damn one of them. When they were no longer of value, they would be discarded. Permanently.
It all started when her own neighbor was stupid enough to click a link on her phone. What does your astrological sign say about you and dating?
“What kind of fucking idiot are you?” she yelled at her.
“Please don’t be mad. You’re the computer geek. Help me! I paid them $39.95 for the results and then it snowballed from there.”
“What do you mean?” she asked the woman.
“I mean, now they’re taking out $69.95 every month and I can’t find a way to stop it!”
Hers seemed easy to fix. You contact the credit card company and tell them it was a fraudulent charge, nothing that you agreed to. It worked but only after hundreds of dollars in payments.
Then her other neighbor complained about her security on her condo.
She’d installed a small security system that was supposed to cost her only $49 per month.
Eighteen months later, she was transferred for her job to another city.
But the security company refused to cancel the service, saying she signed a six-year contract for the service.
“How can they do this? I didn’t sign anything. Everything was done online.”
As she looked into that issue, she discovered that there was a tiny box the user had to check in order to move forward with the security agreement. That box authorized the company to accept their signature for an agreed upon time frame for the service.
The print was so small, so lengthy, no one would read it. Not even her neighbor who was a para-legal.
But all of it got her to thinking. It’s all too easy. Companies were making millions, if not billions of dollars scamming customers. But she wasn’t a company.
Trolling the internet at night she discovered an online community that spoke of nothing excepting duping gamers and shoppers out of money. Hidden fees, hidden dimensions of products that were unrealistic, services never rendered, and so much more.
This was her retirement plan. Screw the 401k. Fuck the pension.
“Ma’am? What do you want me to do?” he asked snapping her from her own thoughts.
“I want you to keep trying and get into that fucking system. There are millions of dollars available to us.”
“Ma’am, I don’t think we can get to their budget distributions or their accounting sheets,” he said quietly.
“I don’t want that. I want the secrets. The things we can sell, leak to the news, give to interested parties. That’s what we’re going to do. Every time one of their idiot employees clicks a link on an unauthorized site, on a company computer, we are going to be there to chase them down.”
He nodded at her, staring at his own laptop in his hands. Then he smiled. Suddenly he smiled.
“What? What are you thinking?” she asked.
“Social media.”
“We’re working with that,” she said dismissively.
“No. No, not like this. I’m thinking we get part of the team to troll the social media sites to see what these people are interested in. Do they like cats, dogs, knitting, painting, dancing, hell, I don’t know anything! Then we intentionally put ads in their feed to draw them in.”
“How many people would you need?” she asked staring at him.
“At least ten to start. I have a few that can get on this right now but we’ll want to create a sort of routing system that leads us to the individual, then follows to their social media accounts, collects data from there and then intentionally feeds their interests.”
“This could be very, very profitable,” she smiled. If this worked, they could find channels of revenue that would last for years. Once she finished with her personal pet project, this could carry her through beyond old age. She would be a very wealthy woman.
“Millions,” he grinned.
“Alright. Do it. Andy? Do it big!”