Ditto, and in my case, it was $2,000. Someone got hold of the number of my debit card and used it to spend $2,000 at a branch on the post office (?) I have never been to.
They immediately reversed the charges, but said they would conduct an investigation. A week later, I got a letter informing me that the investigation showed that the charges were indeed fraudulent, and the reversal was permanent.
Now, my account is set up (by me) to send me an email any time there is a charge over $250. So as soon as that charge went through, I was on the phone with the bank. My timeliness may have played a role. For all I know, they checked video footage from the PO, which was still available because of the time frame they had to work with.
So other people have suggested. I wondered what they were going to do with $2,000 worth of pre-paid boxes, bubble wrap, and commemorative stamps. I guess there are people with serious bubble wrap habits. But this was two years ago. If it had happened during the lockdown, might not have seemed so unlikely.
I once had someone use my USPS account to send out dozens of packages. Luckily, they couldn’t use my credit card (the USPS asks for the code on the back of the card for each transaction), but the card they used was a bad one and the USPS wanted their money. I explained the situation and they didn’t bill me.
But this was credit card fraud, which is different from draining your account of cash and borking your mortgage. Just sayin’. The issuers don’t really care that much about card fraud, beyond not wanting it to go up much: it’s a drop in the bucket against their revenues and profit.
I read a sob story recently about someone who had their card breached and didn’t realize it until they went to get a loan (the classic way people find out). It was clear from the story that this was NOT a new card taken out by the thieves, but that the crooks had changed the billing address. Yet the article was 100% sympathetic, including quoting her as saying that she hadn’t been getting the bills. Sorry, that’s not much of an excuse–if you’re using the card and not getting the bills, that might should be a clue, eh?
With almost any card now, you can set it up to get notification of ANY CNP (card not present) transaction. (And if your card won’t, you should switch to another one.) Even with my wife’s Amazon habit, this is pretty harmless to do; there’s no good reason not to configure this, unless you’re Luddite enough not to have text capability–but then there’s email. Do it! Now!!