These things happen, and aren’t quite as severe as getting identify thieved. You can get your number and PIN skimmed, but oftentimes they are obtained and you aren’t specifically targeted in any way. In other words, it might be prudent to rethink your habits/machines you use, but not necessarily required.
The first time they called me over a single purchase of a Gamefly subscription. The second time were for several purchases in the LA area. I’ve also been contacted if I travel and forget to inform them. In the former cases, a person calls me, but in the latter it was automated, and didn’t bug me after I pushed “1” to confirm purchases. This suggests that the personal calls were when they seriously suspected fraud. I have no idea how they differentiate suspected fraud vs. probably legitimate purchases that are out of character. The fraud charges weren’t completely out of character (no buying of huge items nor odd ones). I am thankful that they did, though. In both cases there was no hassle from the bank.
In both cases it was a credit card, not a debit (although same bank). The liability for the former in the US is much lower for the user.
I live in NJ, where we don’t pump our own gas, so when you pay by credit card you hand it to the pump jockey. After having my credit card number stolen three times, I started paying cash for gas and the thefts stopped. The only other time my card leaves my site is at a restaurant. I know some people insist on accompanying their card while it gets swiped, but I can’t be bothered.
My credit card company recently replaced my card with a “chip and signature” card and for the life of me I can’t understand why they bothered. There is no security advantage at all.
Yikes! Do American restaurants still take your card away to swipe it? In Chip-and-Pin-Land (or at least in my corner of Chip-and-Pin-Land) they have wireless card readers which they bring to the table so you never have to let go of the card.
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Yikes! Do American restaurants still take your card away to swipe it?
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Almost always, unless you’re at a diner sort of place (Denny’s, Ihop, etc.) where you pay at the register on the way out.
I have been to one place in San Francisco (forget the name, but it was in the Pier 39 area) where the servers used iPhones with Square readers for order taking and payment, but that’s the exceedlingly rare exception to the norm of them taking your card somewhere.
My in-laws just got a notice from their bank that their debit card was being used in Indiana. They do not live anywhere NEAR Indiana. This is apparently the second such incident in the past couple years.
The bank said that they’d get a new debit card in 90 days. I hope they misunderstood, and it meant their funds would be restored in 90 days. Not that that’s acceptable either…
Speaking of which, our bank actually caught and stopped a suspicious purchase a couple weeks ago. It was actually legitimate - my husband was paying for some expensive repairs on the in-laws’ condo, and the contractor entered the wrong billing address (the condo, not our home) so things looked wonky and they put a hold on the card. They did text me and emailed me, so I knew what the problem was and it got sorted out quickly.
The chip is an RIDF chip (Radio Frequency). They can be read from a distance of a few feet to a few yards.
Most US credit cards use magnetic strips, which have to be actually touched to be accessed, either by swiping the card or reading the number.
I know that US credit card companies were, at one point, going to use RIDF technology, but gave it use because it’s so easy to pull the data.
Good and bad news on my suspected fraud…it ended up being exactly what I thought it was from the beginning…a legitimate charge that used a wholly unfamiliar business name (that was similar to the name of a strip club a few blocks away) and not entered until days after the actual date charged, so it didn’t jog my memory. ( I thought I’d paid cash for this particular event…at the last second I changed my mind). The bad news? it’s Thursday, and I still haven’t gotten the promised paperwork from the bank, and I informed them last Saturday. Plus, THEY didn’t solve the riddle…I did it by Googling the name of the business so I could call them, and that’s when I discovered the two similar names. And when I went in to the bank to tell them to stop the process, I had to explain THREE times to the supervisor what had transpired…she kept getting confused, though the teller helping me understood with no problems. And they wonder why I’ve switched the bulk of my account (lol…I kill myself! Bulk! HA!) to another institution. Oh, and I happened to be in the bank we use for work the other day and she was offering to make a replacement debit card right there in the bank for someone…I still have to wait ten days to get my replacement.
Ugh!! I hate those cryptic charge descriptions - I’ve had to google a few of them from time to time myself.
Once when I misplaced my wallet (which naturally turned up AFTER I’d cancelled everything in it), my husband happened to work just a few blocks from our credit union. He had a replacement card that same day.