D'oh! Someone stole my credit card number...

[trancejeremy]

Has this happened to anyone else?

I go today to buy something at amazon.com, and my card was declined. So I enter it in again. And again declined. So I go to the online page for my card (Bank of America) and I have a few weird charges.

So I call the credit card company up, and after several bewildering minutes in trying to get a real person, I finally did somehow (randomly pressing numbers).

Anyway, apparently the credit card company caught it, or found some chargers suspicious and thus put a hold on the card. (Though they didn't bother to tell me for some reason).

They cancelled that one and are sending me a new one this week (and presumably I won't be liable for any of the other charges, though only 1 for $70 got through before they put the hold on. There were some other charges, but they were all later credited back on the listing)

But I'm somewhat baffled as to how someone got my number. I don't use it very often, only for online purchases. Pretty much just Paypal, Amazon.com, Blockbuster, another video rental site (sort of a second tier one I was trying out), and Gamestop. I guess a few other sites in the past, but nothing weird.

 

[DaveStebbins]

Same thing happened to me earlier this month. The Visa Corporation called me to ask about suspicious activity on my card. It's happened a couple of times in the past, but it was always just me on a shopping spree. They asked me if I had made a purchase from Air Madrid, I said no, and we put a hold on the card. They removed the Air Madrid charge and went over charges for the previous week and I got a new card about a week and a half later.

This sort of thing is actually not that uncommon. They could have gotten your CC number from any number of places. Mine was probably stolen from my bank, or from the Visa Corporation itself. They had sent me a notice about six months ago that my card was one of thousands that may have been compromised, but I didn't change it then because I've had it for a dozen years and know the 16-digit number by heart.

In fact, I got my monthly statement yesterday in the mail and noticed two other charges that I will have to call and have removed tomorrow. The interesting part is that one of them was posted two days after the hold was placed on the card.

Stuff happens.

 

[Harmon]

Mother in Law had her card used to make purchases a few years back.

She found out through her card where the purchases were made and she called company- they would not tell her anything about the purchase, so she called back and informed them that the purchase had not arrived and wanted the shipping address (after she varified who she was with them). They told her the address.

Interestingly she knew those involved.

Might be worth it to see if you can locate who made the purchases, and give them a call.

Best of luck.

 

[trancejeremy]

It's just so weird, though. I've only had it a year and I probably have used it no more than 30 times total (if that).

 

[DaveStebbins]

How much it gets used might not matter. A surprising amount of the time, these things are stolen by hacking the databases of banks which sponsor them. As you can probably understand, the banks don't publicize this very much.

 

[Umbran]

Some time ago, a third party exposed a whole mess of Bank of America card numbers. They notified me of the exposure. I never saw any odd purchases on my card, but a couple of weeks ago, they replaced my card anyway, with a new number, as a precaution.

You may be one of the unlucky folks whose numbers got exposed and used...

 

[Sandain]

I had the same thing happen to me a few weeks back - 5k of air travel tickets to spain or something. The girl at Visa was really, nice - made me sign a fraud form, and got me a new card.

 

[Soel]

My brother had a problem with this last year. His card was one of the lot of card numbers that were stolen last summer. The issuing bank canceled the card and sent a new one. He even called and confirmed the cancellation.

2-3 months later, he was shopping with his new card, but it was declined at checkout. On calling the bank, he found out that someone had used his OLD card number (the one cancelled several months earlier) to purchase things online. There was no way the card should have worked. Even the bank was baffled, but still, they had to "honor" the charges.

It took him a month and a half to finally get the charges taken off. Suffice it to say that he no longer does business with that bank.