So this past week police found a card scanning device on an ATM in Virginia Beach. This little gizmo attaches to the mouth of the ATM, scans your info, and then after a few minutes spits the card back out.

The bad guys can then use your details for purchases, or even make up a dummy of your ATM card.

First of all, do not worry about this. We don’t want to be one of those local news outlets where one woman chokes on an ice cube and then we scare everyone into building a little brick and mortar wall around your ice makers.

This will almost certainly never happen to you. And while we’re on the topic, your child will not be abducted from your car.

You will also never get bit by a mosquito that has malaria, or pecked by a bird that has avian flu. God forbid you get nuzzled by a pig that has swine flu, but it will never ever happen.

Okay, there’s one thing you should worry about. Come Halloween you shouldn’t eat any apples given to you by old people. Those apples are filled with razor blades or a terribly dangerous Pop Rocks and cola mixture.

Back to the ATM fraud thing. Believe it or not, this actually happened to me. I was living in Cape Town, South Africa, where this kind of fraud is as popular as snap bracelets were back in the day. It all happened really quick. My card got “stuck.” Some nice seeming (if somewhat toothless) stranger came up and said, “Oh Lord, is your card stuck? You just need to retype your PIN a few times and it should pop back out.”

And–Lo and Behold!–the card popped back out. Later that night I realized that all my money had also popped out of my account.

So the moral of this story is that if your card gets “stuck,” if somebody tells you the answer is to retype your PIN, don’t do it. Your card will come out naturally once the scanner is finished. The second moral is this will never happen to you, so ignore everything you just read.

As for my silver lining to my South Africa story? I can only hope that toothless woman used my money to take a trip to America one crisp October. I hope she went trick-or-treating. And I pray to Sweet Jesu above that she blew up like a seagull from an Alka-Seltzer.