Someone got my credit card number somehow and I’m trying to figure out where. I’m not one of those people who uses one for everything, so there aren’t many opportunities to get it stolen. Do the thieves go on an immediate shopping binge as soon as they get the number? If that’s the case, the last legit charge was Virgin Mobile where they have my cc number for my smart phone monthly charge. Beyond that I only use it at Amazon, to buy gas at Fred Meyer, which I haven’t done for a few weeks, and I did buy 2 karaoke tracks online, but that’s been awhile as well. I’m casting a jaundiced eye at Virgin Mobile. Especially since someone tried to buy a smartphone or something because the biggest charge they tried was at Boost Mobile for about 600 bucks.
No matter how careful you think you are, apparently it’s never careful enough. I’m assuming it wasn’t Chase itself. Bastards.
Several years ago, some World of Warcraft player got hold of my Discover card info and used it to pay his subscription. No idea how they did but I managed to catch it before anything else could be charged. Discover fraud prevention quickly took care of the problem.
If there was a physical counterfeit card, IIRC it couldn’t have been made just using the numbers you can read on the card. The mag stripe has a few bits of additional information. In that case, your card could have been stolen by a compromised card reader on the gas bump (called a “skimmer”), or some middle-man in the card processing chain was hacked…
The thieves typically operate in a market. Someone hacks a processing company and harvests a hundred thousand credit cards, which they then sell to other criminals that make counterfeit cards and try to buy easily resalable stuff.