Beware of a calm surface – You never know what lies beneath

Our last week at Hobbiton… sorry I mean our Airbnb (for Hobbits), was passing sedately and mercifully quickly no doubt aided by the fact that we had packed in as many excursions as physically possible to avoid spending any time confined to our broom cupboard sized accommodation. With plenty of exercise, vitamin D and vitamin sea we were feeling surprisingly good.

The highlights of the week were without question our trips to Summerville Beach and to the Kejimkujik National Seaside Park. I am not sure why we were so surprised by how pristine, untouched, and achingly beautiful the beaches in NS would be, and it did not stop there because we got to explore and take in everything that the NS coastline had to offer without encountering another human being.

In fact, it was surreal how few people were around! Now I know that even at the end of April in Canada winter is still clinging on, unwilling to relinquish its icy grip to spring so naturally you would not expect as many people to be strolling the beaches, but we did not see another person at these locations at all. This is one of the many wonderful attributes Nova Scotia has to offer, it is a large province but has a small population in comparison which means a slower pace of life, with no hustle and bustle which makes venturing out to locations like these a truly immersive experience, just us, the sea, and nature.

As fluffball parents we were very conscious of the fact that Lola had spent months being confined to kennels and travel crates, she had one month to stretch her legs and enjoy some freedom at the Lilly Pad before we were all confined to a slightly bigger dog kennel … sorry Airbnb in Liverpool, so a long stroll on the beach was well overdue.

Now I may have mentioned before that the beach is Lola’s happy place (and therefore our happy place too), Lola is usually very goofy, she is a Boxer after all but when we take her to the beach her goofometer readings go off the charts and Summerville Beach Park seemed like it was the ideal place for her to unleash her full goof potential, to be honest we had not seen her at maximum goof for quite some time and we were starting to get a bit worried about our little girl.

Lola was clearly struggling in the cardboard box… sorry Airbnb, the noise through the night was keeping her awake, and making her anxious not to mention how unsettling it has been being dragged from one Airbnb to the next.

Summerville Beach Park is one of the finest sandy beaches on the South Shore, the open salt marshes and dunes providing the perfect backdrop to an expanse of white sand beach which is also the nesting area to the Piping Plover. Careful to avoid any areas where birds may be nesting, we made our way to the water’s edge and watched Lola transform into a wriggling bundle of joy.

Now, for us dipping our feet in the Atlantic Ocean in April would be Tanta-mount to sticking our toes in the freezer but for Lola it was refreshing and thirst quenching! We all know that drinking sea water makes people crazy (if the movies are to be believed) but for dogs it just gives them the squits! Between dips in the frigid water and digging her way through the sand to China it was not long before she settled down on the sand drool foaming at her mouth, salt crusting around her eyes and snout and her ears flapping in the wind, energy spent and utterly content.

The Kejimkujik National Park Seaside (or Kedgee to the locals) was quite different to Summerville, it was far more rugged in its beauty, and it also had far more wildlife roaming around and therefore was not suitable to allow Lola off the lead nor was it permitted for that matter. As soon as we headed off onto the trail, we saw signs warning of bear activity and advising hikers to ensure they carried bear spray, woefully underprepared yet again and armed only with granola bars, apples, and trail mix, we hoped and prayed that the bears in Kedgee were vegetarians.

Our hike through the labyrinth of dense shrubs and trees passed without event, no bears, and no people for that matter. The gravel path soon gave way to sand as the headland, bay and white sandy beach rose on the horizon before us. Initially we were stunned by the sun shining off the turquoise waters, but once our eyes adjusted, we could see movements on the islets and rocks out in the bay, seals were basking on the islets and seabirds perched on rocks chattering away to each other, it took our breath away.

With the bay to ourselves we let the scenery and sounds of nature invigorate our senses so much so that by the time we reached our car some hours later we were in a zen state and almost floated back to the rabbit hutch … sorry Airbnb.

The start of the new week (our final week in the shoe box … sorry Airbnb) heralded the end of our sightseeing tour of Liverpool for the time being. Throughout the previous week we had been liaising with our lawyer and his assistant to get the relevant documentation signed and any fees paid for like the title tax for example, and with those things taken care of it was now time for the big payment. It was time to make the settlement payment on our forever home.

Prior to our last weekend in Liverpool our lawyer’s assistant had emailed us bank account details to electronically transfer the settlement funds into, settlement on the house had to be made on the Tuesday so on the Monday armed with this information we made the two-and-a-half-hour journey to Halifax. Having a bank with only one branch in NS which was in Halifax was really starting to become a pain in the butt hole.

Making suitable time we headed to HSBC and planned with one of the service managers to fill in the appropriate paperwork to allow the electronic transfer to be made, the manager queried the details of the bank that the funds were to be transferred into asking us to double check that the information was correct. We showed the manager the email with the transfer details sent from the lawyer’s office and although still perplexed he submitted the forms.

With the final hurdle out of the way we wanted to use being in Halifax to our advantage and do some shopping for the essentials that we would need in the first few weeks in our new home to tide us over, there was still no word from our shippers and there was no telling at this point how long it would be until our possessions arrived.

With a successful day of retail therapy under our belts and the late afternoon drawing in we were paying for our final purchases before stopping for the day when we received a phone call from the bank …Hmmm why would the bank be calling us? This did not bode well. Once we had left the bank the service manager had queried the bank details issued by our lawyer with his supervisor, who had then passed on these concerns to our account manager. Our account manager had investigated these concerns further and was now calling us with some unwelcome news.

So, I have some good news, some bad news, and some even worse news!

Our account manager informed us that she had put a hold on the settlement transfer due to the bank account details given by the lawyer being hinky! Least of which was the fact that the address given was a residential address and not a business. Our account manager wanted us to call our lawyer immediately and query the transfer details.

As soon as we finished speaking with the account manager we called our lawyer, but unable to speak to him directly we spoke to his assistant instead which worked out better because she was the person who had initially emailed us through the bank transfer information.

We explained the situation to her and asked for confirmation of the bank transfer details that she had supplied, to say that we were not expecting the response she gave us would be the understatement of the century.  The lawyer’s assistant was utterly confused stating that she had not emailed us any bank transfer instructions. What the actual eff!!! Our blood ran cold. Surely, she was mistaken, we had the email to prove it and if she did not send the instructions then who did?

By now the lawyer had joined in on the phone conversation, we had forwarded them the email with the payment instructions originating from their office so that they could see what we were talking about. Much to our growing horror they checked the email address originating from their office only to discover that the email address was slightly different, the difference was barely noticeable, only by looking closely could you see it was different by two letters.

The lawyer who also had a bachelor’s degree in computer science stated that he was going to investigate the origin of the email from his end just in case their email system had been hacked although this was unlikely with the level of protection they had in place, whilst we called our bank manager who then cancelled the settlement transfer.

At this point I felt like I was going to throw up, what the fluffing hell was happening? Who did we just nearly transfer our life savings to? It was after 4pm and unable to sit in the store carpark any longer we made our way back to Liverpool, you could have cut the tension on the journey back with a knife, we had gone from cloud nine to rock bottom in the blink of an eye.

There are no bad days, just days that build character.

As soon as we got back, we received a call from the lawyer who was able to confirm that it was highly likely that Martins email account had been hacked and that he needed to log into his email account to confirm this and change all his passwords immediately.

Much to our alarm the lawyer was correct, Martins email account had in fact been hacked and all his emails for the past few weeks had been intercepted. The realisation of having nearly transferred all our savings into the account of a scammer hit us like a sucker punch to the gut, we could have lost everything and the consequences did not even bear thinking about. It would have been the end of our dream in Canada, in fact it would have been the end of our dreams period.

I don’t even know what we would have done had we lost it all, packed our bags and ended up on mum’s doorstep seemed highly likely. Thankfully, HSBC bank were onto it and noticed the dodgy bank details straight away.

How could this have happened to us? Being ex-cops, we pride ourselves on being astute and switched on, why didn’t we notice that the email address details were slightly different? We had been corresponding with the lawyers all week it did not even occur to us to question the email address. We could have gone around and around in a guilt loop all night, but it would not change the outcome.

In the end we chose to look at this in a positive way, we were grateful that our savings were still safe in our account, we changed all the passwords and strengthened the security settings on Martin’s email account, so good luck trying to hack us again you scamming mother fudgers (just for clarity to all those scammers out there that is not a challenge).

No amount of positivity however was going to change the fact that we still needed to provide the settlement payment for our new house by midday tomorrow.

Tomorrow is always another day to make things right.