The absurd new world where your bank interrogates you more than your doctor
The call came just as I set my coffee down—one of those “urgent but polite” texts from Chase J.P. Morgan warning me that a transaction had been cancelled for “potentially fraudulent activity,” which is corporate code for: you’re about to spend the rest of your day proving you exist.
I dialed the number. A voice from a Mumbai call center—a bright, overworked voice—answered. I could hear the script pages flipping.
“Sir, please confirm your name?”
We go through the warm-up act—address, account, last four digits—and then he asks, with surprising gravity, what he should call me.
“Bill,” I said. “Just Bill.”
“Hello, Mr. Just Beel.”
Nothing prepares you for the moment a bank decides your identity is a hypothesis. Increasingly, the modern world doesn’t verify transactions; it verifies people—and it makes us audition for our own lives.
He launched into the ritual: he would text me a code; I would confirm yes; he would ask questions; I would comply like a man testifying before a committee investigating the circumstances of his own birth. But it veered off the rails almost immediately.
“How did you find this merchant? Have you met them in person? Have they ever threatened you? Are you in any danger right now?”