When I became editor of the Shawangunk Journal, the first email I got was from my new boss. The second or third email was from a stranger pretending to be him.

The subject line was “Fast Response!!” and the sender was Alex Shiffer, the publisher of the Journal. Or so it looked. Actually, the display name on the email address, which appeared to be hijacked from another scamming victim, was “Fast Response!!” and the email subject line was “Alex Shiffer” – probably inverted so they could use that address to send fresh emails to many, many people just by updating the subject line.

The content was simple, clear, and actionable: “John, Re-email me your cellphone number.”

I shouldn’t have gotten tricked, but nobody should and, yet, everybody does. It was perfect timing. I had just started and so I didn’t know my boss’s style of communication, and the email client we use here was still new to me so I didn’t notice that the subject line and sender had been reversed.

So, like an idiot, I “re-emailed” my phone number, and promptly got a text asking me to buy gift cards. The text said that by boss couldn’t do this because he was driving.

I read the text, and turned to look at my boss typing on the other side of the room, and at the moment I thought, perhaps, I was about to be scammed.

I consider myself pretty savvy with technology. The son of a computer programmer, I spent a good part of my career at tech publications. And I was almost absolutely fleeced by a scammer.

It’s not just me. Scams have erupted in the past few years, and, unlike the days of the Nigerian Prince emails, which were aimed at the least sophisticated computer users, the new scammers are targeted, precise and merciless.

Many email and phone scams are now remarkably sophisticated. They are built around gaining the trust of a wealthy target. INTERPOL calls these “pig-butchering scams.” Last year, the digital scamming industry took $1 trillion – trillion, with a “t” – from victims around the world. And we, here, are not immune.

A jumble of technological factors is powering this nightmare – artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, social media. Gift cards are such a huge part of the scam economy that New York State offers a warning sign for stores that sell them.

Just in the past few weeks, New York issued scam alerts for so-called “friendly greeting” scams (in which victims are contacted by supposed acquaintances with invitations to a round of golf or dinner), fake student loan forgiveness, financial scams targeting the elderly via text or email, and fake charities collecting for hurricane relief.

Back in September, the Town of Ulster was targeted for a ransomware attack, in which their computer systems were supposed to be shut down until a ransom was paid. But something went wrong – the attackers reportedly never communicated their demands or how to pay, and the town servers were erased. Ulster has been trying to restore their lost data, using workarounds for necessary processes while manually re-entering data from printouts. Likely, whatever happens, a great deal of information is simply gone.

Town Supervisor James Quigley was philosophical about the whole thing. “If you look at the comparative breaches that have happened in our society,” he said, “this may be a major event in the Town of Ulster but it’s a minor event in the world.”

Previous generations had to worry about a fire or a flood destroying their records, but a fire or a flood has to come to you. Now, anybody, anywhere could bring you back to square one.

I have no idea how a scammer knew I was working at the Journal almost at the moment of my arrival. The editorial introducing me was not yet published, the masthead did not yet include my name, and my social media – to the extent it even exists – said nothing. What I do know is that I got four more emails over the course of a few weeks all instructing me to “Kindly confirm your cell.” Eventually, after enough non-responses, the scammers moved on. For now.