Just wondered how many of us on the list have been victims of debit card fraud?
I have a habit of checking my debit (checking) account about every other day to make sure I don't miss putting an entry into Quicken. Well, recently I saw that I'd shopped at a shoe store. Not likely. I'd rather go to the dentist than buy shoes. That one had cleared.
Anyway, I check the account again at lunch, now I got some Harley shop hitting me for
960.00, JP cycles for 300 or so, and some other place for whatever. In total, my little checking account is being hit for 1600+. These are pending.So I call the number on the debit card, get someone after 3 tries that barely speaks English who also wants me to wait and call back when the pending transactions turn into cleared. F that. I tell him deal with it now. He mumbles, I can't understand him and by the end of the conversation, he is supposed to email me a form to sign and return.
Well, before I leave work, I vnc into my home system using a ssh tunnel (for the geeks) and I can see I don't have said email.
Now I head to my local bank. My "personal banker" looks in the system, figures out that the email should come to me tomorrow because the guy didn't want to deal with the one that cleared already and wanted to do all at once.
This banker calls the Harley shop in Florida (a long way from Michigan) and id's himself as a bank officer investigating suspected fraud. They basically told him to f off. I'm not going to feel bad when they eat near a grand. Since the debit was only a few hours old, UPS or Fedex had not likely picked up the order. They could have saved some bucks by talking to the man.
So I file the claim, the shoes are credited back the next day but the bike stuff keeps hanging out there for days. Finally they clear it. So I wait, a week later I visit them again, 'personal banker' isn't there, another guy is. He does some keyboard tapping and tells me it will be back Monday which it was.
Now I'm trying to figure out how my card was compromised. I'm thinking some on line merchant I delt with was hacked. I tend to use my credit card for sites that are not major retailers.
If I eat out on business which is seldom, I use the credit card, not the debit card.
As far as the computer(s) being hacked, I'm pretty carefull, hide behind a firewall, use pegasus mail, keep up on patches and run the microsoft malicious software removal tool periodically in detail mode. I also use spybot and teatimer and of course, my brain.
Wes