This past weekend someone got hold of my check card number and made an order over the net. I was able to get that stopped and the money refunded. The card is now canceled. I am changing the way I handle things regarding these cards. I do not know how my card number made it all the way across the country. I suspect that either someone got the number off a website where I had placed an order or some restaurant employee where I’ve gone to eat has been making a list. Either way I have no way of tracing that. Therefore I will now be paying with cash for any transactions that would require my card to leave my sight, even for a minute. I don’t like carrying around large amounts of cash, however I like these kinds of violations even less.
Inverse Paradigm
The final frontier is not space…it's consciousness
For the most part, security breaches like this have nothing to do with you or your habits.
It’s a lax employee at a business where credit card transactions are still manual and someone went dumpster diving for the carbons. Or, the most obvious culprit, crappy bank security.
I recently got hit for a couple of dodgy transactions. One, a UK based charity for Africa, which was the test transaction. Then a much larger hit for a well-known fraud from an Italian train line. The Italian mob triggered an alert on my account, but the moronic bank still allowed it to clear. It took them six weeks to credit me back that transaction.
There’s big money in dodgy credit cards. Some of the UK papers have been reporting on it and found you can pick up a full set of cards and documents to enable identity theft for a stupidly small amount of money.