Well, I just had an interesting hour.

I got a phone call from someone identifying themselves as being with "CIBC". They want to speak to me on a "personal banking matter".

Umm, I have no personal account with CIBC.

I do, however, have a student loan. So I ask what department this person is calling from. She won't tell me. Nor will she give me her name.

Is it just me, or would alarm bells be ringing for anyone else at this point?

She did give me a number to call back. I wrote it down, hung up, and then googled it. Nothing. Reverse lookup. Nothing. I sent Matt some IMs about the situation and he agreed it was weird.

I had no idea what to do. I wanted to find out what the heck was going on, but was a bit (ok, a lot) suspicious at the secrecy of the woman I had been talking to. So I phoned the police to ask their advice. Spoke to a nice officer with a more level head than mine was at that point, and she suggested phoning CIBC to see if they had been calling me.

I did, and they hadn't. Moreover, they didn't have the number I had been given listed in the directory of the lady I was speaking with.

HMM.

After waffling a bit, I decided that it couldn't hurt to phone the number as they obviously had my name and phone number at that point (having asked for me by name). I just wouldn't give them any more info than they already had.

I phone, and it was the "CIBC Student Loans Center" automated answering service. I know what comes next on this service, having sat through it more times than I'd have liked - it's going to ask for my social insurance number, which I am absolutely not giving to an unpublished, unacknowledged-on-the-web phone number that CIBC doesn't even recognize.

I checked it against the number for the student loans center on the web, and they're definitely not the same.

HMM.

I then phoned the published number for the student loan center, and asked if I had been called and if they knew anything about the number I had been given - it turns out that it is one of their numbers. They had been phoning to let me know I would have to start paying my student loans soon, which, duh, I knew since I had been phoning them about two months ago, trying to get information so I could start paying since they were already charging me interest. So she gave me the info they were going to tell me on the other number and that's all taken care of, but seriously: get some image lessons, CIBC. Do you think calling people, not identifying yourselves, and giving them unpublished phone numbers is not going to raise a few eyebrows? Seriously?