My friend Diane who must have a big neon sign over her head: "drop it here" because her life is so chaotic and there is always some new thing to stir up her life.

A couple of years ago there was a big a debit card fraud case in her town because someone had stolen card numbers at the local movie theater. It was a big problem to get it straightened out. The other day she called and told me she'd received a credit card receipt texted to her phone from a smoothie shop in Colorado Springs (about 90 minutes away) for someone named Paula with Diane's same last name.

Diane didn't recognize the last four digits of the credit card that were shown on the receipt, but didn't know if this was some sort of scam, so she rushed to the bank and changed her account to a new one. Then, she contacted the police and they said file a report.

She told me about it, and I looked up her last name, which isn't a very common one, on Intelius. They have a free feature where you can see a person's age, the towns where they have lived, and the names of people associated with them. I found a guy named Dan, who lives in Colorado Springs, and there was a Paula (different last name) associated with him.

I told Diane, so she'd have some idea that they were real people, and they did indeed live where the receipt was from.

Next day, she got a $400 receipt for a payment made to a photographer in Oregon. She called the number on it, and he said the people (Dan and Paula) had called him asking what happened to the receipt he promised to send them. Diane gave him her phone number, and he relayed it to Dan, and today he called her. They had a nice chat and discovered their email addresses are very similar.

Both of their credit card accounts are secure - it is a case of the email system for those Box credit card readers linking Diane's email to Dan's card.

Meanwhile, the guy from the smoothie shop called Diane all mad because there was a thing on the receipt asking the customer to go online and make a comment, so when it first happened she went there and described how she'd gone to the police because of this strange email that came to her cell phone from that shop. Not his fault, it appears, but that would tend to be a person's first thought - that some shenanigan was going on at the retailer's end of the deal.

Since her husband's last name is unusual, Diane is sure they must be related, so she plans to get together with this Dan for a cup of coffee and they can decide whose credit card to put it on and see who gets the receipt.

Diane has called me three times to thank me for that little bit of information. Although most of the mystery was solved by ensuing events, somehow that little bit filled out the picture for her so as they unfolded, she was better able to interpret them.