I’m not one of those diligent people that meticulously checks her bank statement every month. Hell I don’t check it EVER. Why would I? So it can tell me I’m skint? Nah, I’ll pass thanks, I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life. However, the downside of living in such blissful ignorance (aside of course from never moderating my spending) is that things can be happening without my knowledge. And they were. Some filthy scammer has been pinching my money!! Motherfuckers!!! Like I’m not broke enough without them helping their scummy little selves to my hard earned, meagre salary (which, by the way, is already very overstretched).

You can imagine my indignance when I made this discovery purely by chance. I had to obtain bank statements for the extremely mundane purpose of applying for a mortgage – yawn – but it all became much more an engaging task when I noticed an odd payment of £27.28 leaving my account, along with a “currency exchange” fee of £0.80p. The fucking cheek of it, I’m even paying for them to rob me in their own currency!! Looking back through the year I saw another payment in July for £27.22 and another in June for £28.21. Both followed by the requisite £0.80p currency exchange fee. Now I had gone from being annoyed at someone stealing from me and my not noticing to downright fucking outraged!!

As if I haven’t got enough going on, selling a house, buying a house, solicitors, mortgage advisors blah blah, now I had to call the pissing bank as well 🤬 But call them I did. Turns out it’s someone calling themselves “Shop Apparel” based in New York. I am definitely not in New York, mores the pity, and I most definitely haven’t been there for the past 3 months shopping my arse off. Santander are “investigating” whatever that means but in the meantime have cancelled my debit card and issued a new one, which will arrive in approximately 5 working days. Luckily there’s Apple Pay 🤷🏻‍♀️ which they’ve apparently already switched over. Shame I’ll have to relearn my card number though as it’ll be different. Perhaps that’s a blessing in disguise; if I don’t know the number by heart I can’t spend Willy-nilly without going to get my actual card out. I’ll also have to update PayPal, Amazon… the list goes on. It’s all so bloody inconvenient.

So save yourself the pain and aggravation and give your bank statement a cursory glance every now and then. You probably already do. I probably will for a bit and then I will forget and I won’t bother again til my mortgage needs renewing. I’m just a bit shit like that.

Who knew I could get myself in a pickle without even leaving the house!