Wow, just talked with bank about why my card stopped working. Some a-hole tried booking a hotel in PA with it on the 17th. Thank goodness it triggered a fraud alert. I live quite a few states away.
This happened once before about 12 years ago. Same deal. First fraud attempt triggered the bank and they stopped the card. They issued a new one and never had anymore issues.
Whatever they do to detect fraud is certainly very good. Thank you Bank.
I’ve rerun my virus detection and malware bytes on both computers. Nothing.
I’m thinking about reinstalling windows. That’s six hours of work on each computer to get windows and all my software setup again. A lot of work. I don’t even know if my computer leaked my card or not. :dubious: All scans are clean.
The weird thing is, I had just gotten a new card for the one that expired. Same cc num, just a new date. I had only been using the new card a week or so.
I had cut up the old card. I guess someone could have pieced it together. I’m still very suspicious of this laptop. I’m wiping the drive Sat and reinstalling. The scans are negative but that doesn’t mean I’m safe. Better safe than sorry.
At least now my new card should have a shiny new cc number that’s never been exposed anywhere. I’m going to be much more careful with it. The hard part is waiting a week for my new card.
I often book hotel rooms several states away from where I live. I wonder why that would have triggered any sort of fraud alert. I guess it’s a good thing it did!
Chase bank is really good at detecting fraud. I’ve had two instances of my card being cloned (my card was used at actual stores, not online, when it was still in my possession) and Chase caught it immediately. Unfortunately I only use Chase ATMs so I guess they’re not so good at the prevention aspect.
You don’t need to assume there’s some hidden virus on your computer, since a lot of fraud can be traced to data theft from businesses and credit card processors. For example, 46 million credit card numbers were stolen from TJ Maxx. Big thefts like that come up in the news a few times a year. Then, there are plenty of smaller thefts that never make national news – a crooked restaurant employee can easily access thousands of credit card numbers. One time, my bank replaced my credit card after discovering a security breach with some middle-man credit card processors.
Yeah I wouldn’t worry about someone trying to get into YOUR computer to get your one little credit card number. Why would a thief bother with that when they can break in to a store’s computer system and get millions of credit card numbers at once? lazybratsche speaks the truth.
Chase called SWMBO several months ago and asked her if she was in NYC. She said no and asked why. The Chase security then said someone was trying to make a purchase with her card number. He then chuckled and said from the sound of her voice, he assumed she wasn’t a six foot four black male, either. They changed the number and sent her a new card immediately. The black male got busted.
You could post to one of the forums (listed in the sticky about computer problems) to see if they can suggest some Big Guns scans to run as well - when we had a rootkit last summer, AVG would pick up the crap the rootkit was trying to download, clean it, and the next day the crap would be back. It would NOT, however, find the actual rootkit - nor did Malwarebytes.
I wound up spending quite a few hours, with assistance from the Malwarebytes forum (I think that was it), getting it cleaned out.
That said, it’s reasonably likely that your card was intercepted in one of a number of other ways. Did you use it anywhere brick-and-mortar? Might a vendor’s site have been hacked? Did you use it at an ATM? Is there any chance someone might have had a chance to check out your wallet? The one time a card of mine was compromised, it was someone at my doctor’s office (large university hospital) who took patient credit card information and went shopping. Some colleagues were burned when we were all away from our desks at a meeting, and the admin person (a temp, her first or second day) apparently went through some purses. She went out for lunch after that and never came back. We were all worried about her, until we heard that several people had their cards flagged by their banks’ fraud departments.
That said: I’ve never had a true fraud stopped by the bank. On a couple of occasions, where we had made purchases at overseas vendors, those purchases went through but our next purchases were stopped (and the bank didn’t bother to contact us). On another occasion, different bank, I was paying for our AVG subscription (non-US company) and that actual transaction was flagged until I contacted the bank. At least that time, they stopped the “correct” one.
