Resilience Through Financial Fraud
“Prosperity progress is not only about growth; it is about about staying engaged with your financial life.”
Prosperity is often associated with earning more, saving more, or investing wisely. But sometimes, prosperity looks like protection.
Recently, I experienced something that felt deeply unsettling. A fraudulent charge appeared on my credit card. The bad actor had rented a car with a major chain and even booked international airfare, and around the same time my personal email address was subscribed to more than 100 company websites, many of them international.
A colleague later described it as "violating," and that word fits. It was not just inconvenient or administrative; it felt intrusive, as if someone had stepped into my financial life without permission and attempted to use what we had built.
I later learned that this tactic is called an email bomb, designed to overwhelm your inbox so you miss the fraud alert notification. Realizing how coordinated and intentional these attempts can be was unsettling in its own right.
Thankfully, my credit card company texted me immediately, and I declined the charges before calling the number on the back of my card to report the fraud. We canceled the card, only to cancel it a second time after discovering a payment gateway had been opened with the rental car company. In the hours that followed, I reset passwords, confirmed two factor authentication across financial accounts, and carefully reviewed other transactions to ensure nothing else had slipped through.
I would love to say I felt calm through it all, but that would not be honest. There was frustration and a spike of adrenaline, along with a lingering sense of exposure. And yet, alongside those emotions, there was action.
That is where resilience enters the story. Resilience is not the absence of stress; it is the ability to respond with clarity and movement even when you would rather shut the laptop and pretend it is not happening. Because we had alerts turned on and a habit of reviewing transactions, the fraud was caught quickly, and because we acted immediately, the damage was limited.
What struck me most afterward was this: safeguarding what we have built is part of prosperity. Reviewing transactions regularly, using strong passwords, turning on two factor authentication, and responding quickly to alerts may not feel exciting, but together they form a quiet system of protection that supports everything else we are trying to build.
Prosperity progress is not only about growth; it is about about staying engaged with your financial life rather than assuming everything will quietly take care of itself. If prosperity is one of the Four Facets of Better Living, then protection belongs inside it.
Take a few minutes this week to review recent transactions and confirm your security settings, making sure alerts are turned on and passwords are strong. Building wealth matters, and protecting it matters just as much.