King of the Wild Frontier
So, there it was, pushed onto the "New" email listing on my phone:
From: Member.Services@DisneyAccount.com
Subject: New Sign-in To Your Account
Great! Another scam! I don’t have a “Disney Account.”
There-what-the-fore, I could not have been the “Sign-in” to said non-existent account.
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Earlier, the same day, it had been “PayPal.” Good ol’ “PayPal.” Kindly emailing me to let me know that my charge for $599.37 had cleared. I was now supposedly the owner of Norton Anti-Virus Deluxe software. And there was a handy bold-block colored telephone number to call in case of an error.
I don’t have a PayPal account. I didn’t purchase any Norton software. But I did set up a Venmo account during Covid lockdowns and I used it once in 2020. And Venmo is owned by PayPal. PayPal: ranked 143rd on the 2022 Fortune 500 largest United States corporations by revenue.
The telephone number, of course, didn’t have anything to do with PayPal. The social engineering 101 was designed to trick me into calling the bold-block colored telephone number, whereat a nice “PayPal” customer support impostor person on the other end would extract my actual financial credentials to help the Organization lighten my bank account in support of their beach house in Cancun.
Nevertheless, I wasted the half-hour it took to check my credit card account and that old Venmo account for fraud. Clean, of course.
So now it was a rubbish “Disney Account” scam. How many half-hours is that going to take to patch up.
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I confess a nostalgic soft-spot for Disney. The original Disney. I grew up watching The Mickey Mouse Club on TV.
M-I-C … K-E-Y … M-O-U-S-E
Disney’s nature film series, True Life Adventures, was always a special time for family gathering. Mom was relieved of cooking dinner, and we all ate popcorn instead, on folding trays in front of the TV.
Spin and Marty, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier. I probably had a fake coonskin cap back then. I don’t remember, but everybody did. Not to mention the classic full-length animation films, like Fantasia, with dancing hippos and broomstick minions, rising up whole from splinters, to carry the floodwaters of doom.
So now it was down to “Disney Account” scams.
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Except it wasn’t.
The reality is even worse, maybe, depending on your point of view.
I finally read the email and discovered that it was triggered by having logged in to the ESPN basketball bracket site to check my standing in the family group challenge. No Annette Funicello anywhere in sight. What gives?
Disney, of course, owns ESPN. And, branding!
As Cory Doctorow puts it:
Tech leaders didn’t get stupider or crueler since those halcyon days. … We didn’t replace tech investors and leaders with worse people – we have the same kinds of people but we let them get away with more. We let them buy up all their competitors. We let them use the law to lock out competitors they couldn’t buy …
The Walt Disney Company (trading as DIS on Wall Street):
… commonly known as Disney (/ˈdɪzni/ DIZ-nee) is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate that is headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California.
Let that sink in.
The Walt Disney Company: Net income for fiscal year 2023, $2.354 billion. That’s “net”, as in “net”.
And then there is benevolent ESPN itself, as chronicled on Wikipedia:
On August 8, 2023, Penn Entertainment announced a $2 billion agreement with ESPN to rebrand its Barstool Sportsbook sports betting services as ESPN Bet. As part of the agreement, ESPN will receive $1.5 billion in cash over 10 years, and will take $500 million in Penn stock.
On February 6, 2024, ESPN announced a joint venture with Fox Sports and TNT Sports to offer an as-yet-unnamed sports streaming bundle, including the three organizations’ main linear sports channels and associated media rights, beginning in fall 2024. Additionally, the company plans to launch a “flagship” standalone streaming offering, including the ESPN and ESPN2 linear channels, in late summer or fall 2025.
Quiet on the set!
Cue Uncle Scrooge McDuck. And …
Roll’em!