How it started
Like I explained, or thought I did, the first assignment came by mistake. Who ever sent the first communication transposed two letters in the email address and, lo and behold, it was mine. I thought it was SPAM or phishing and ignored it for a day. The subject was: ‘New Assignment.’ Finally I read it.... and replied yes. ‘If you’ve changed your hair style, up-load a new passport-photo to...’ Hmmm, what could go wrong? Would they make movie-stars who looked like me? What did I have to lose?' I almost uploaded somebody else’s picture from a Google image search but sent a scan of my passport photo cropped to the correct perspective and so many pixels by so many pixels.
Two days later I got an ID badge and assignment instructions. A week after the assignment I received an email saying my direct deposit account was no longer active to provide routing and account numbers for a good one. So this was it I thought, the scam... But again, what did I have to lose? I opened a new account with $ 10 and sent the information. $ 2,900 was deposited the next day. Then they asked for my Social Security number, which I assumed they would have already had {somebody else’s}. I thought about it, withdrew $ 800 which was real money and figured so steal my identity it hadn’t done me much good. Nothing bad happened. I got new assignments. Then a military ID arrived so I could board flights from air bases, I figured the code on the card meant ‘inactive, medically retired.’ I was hoping they made me a Major but my old Sergeant rank was there along with my actual name. In fact it was the real me. The only things that were phony were the assignment badges. Somehow the real me had become welded to the mistake and I was now the mistake, and the mistake was real.