Tricky Credit Card Crooks

Credit to Flickr

In the words of Dwight Schrute, “Identity theft is not a joke.  Millions of people suffer every year.” This, as I have come to find out, is true.

From 2005 – 2009, roughly 500 million files holding personal identifying information of U.S. citizens were either “lost or stolen” from corporate and government databases. If that was not scary enough, more than 1,268,000 people (and counting) have become victims of some form of identity theft this year, including my family and me. Yes, my family and I are victims of credit card fraud.

Here is how it happened.

My parents’ story: It all started a few months ago in August. When my mom logged into their account, she noticed a charge to the March of Dimes (withdrawing funds to a charity is popular trick among online thieves). Thinking that my dad made a donation, she dismissed the charge.

Then, nearly four months later, two other charges for the charity appeared on their account. This time, my mom did not ignore it. The involuntary, albeit worthwhile, donations concerned my parents. After speaking with the charity’s customer service, my parents learned that a hacker(s) had made the donations for them.

Thanks to my folk’s rather obscure service provider, the hacker(s) was unable to retrieve their e-mail address. So, burglar who lifted their credit card information did not have enough information to withdrawal any substantial amount of money out of their account.

My story: I remember the day exactly. It was Friday, January 22. Like my mom, I was online checking my statement when I noticed a problem with my account. The problem: an extra $60 bucks.

Now this problem – and I use this term loosely – was a refund (another ploy used by credit card crooks) from Pac Sun. I knew this was a “problem” because I had not shopped at Pac Sun in a long while – hence, no refund. But, I thought the “problem” could wait till Monday, as I assumed it was just a simple banking mistake.

Anyway, Monday comes along and the “problem” grew to “problems.” According to my statement, I had Red Boxed a movie on Saturday and gone grocery shopping at Mela Mart on Sunday. I was fairly certain that I had not done either of these things.

While these two activities only amounted to $11 bucks, I became convinced that someone else was using my credit card. But, this confused me. After all, I still had my credit card. How could someone – other than me – walk into a grocery store and charge my account without my card?

Either way, it was clear to me that the credit card bandit was just testing the waters and would by Friday, payday, make the big jump. So, I went through the daunting task of reporting my card stolen. I called 2 different service numbers, spoke to 3 different representatives and answered some-50 security questions. All in all, I spent nearly 3 hours trying to cancel my check card, but I ended up being $50 dollars richer.

Not too shabby.