Tuesday, August 14, 2007

My Sort of Adventure

I have learned that you can have an adventure without anything really happening to you. I went out to dinner with friends last Thursday night. I gave the waiter my debit card to pay. He came back and said it had been refused. I paid with a credit card and decided that since I had closed my husbands account, that the bank had accidentally canceled my debit card.
I go to work on Friday and look at my account. There is a large overdraft protection deposit, but no checks to have caused it.

I was upset to say the least and called the bank, the CSR tells me there were two large debit transactions from Walmart and Kmart in California. I had nothing to do with these. The Bank had stopped the charges so there was no loss.I was instructed to report the attempted the attempted fraud to the police and then sign a fraud statement with them. I was so upset, I left work then and took care of everything then. The bank informed me I wouldn't have any losses, and that I would have a new debit card in a couple of weeks.

I go home, I am telling everyone my story. It is the same response, everyone said they were so much more upset when it happened to someone they know. I am no obsessively checking my account balance a couple of times a day, but everything is good.

I get home last night and there is a message on the voice mail for me. A detective in Redondo Beach California wants to talk to me. This morning I called and talked to him for about half an hour. They caught two people who were using my card and several other stolen cards. The two had been arrested at Nordstroms. At least they were stealing upscale. The thieves were buying stuff and then taking it back the next day for cash refunds. The debit card was counterfeit with my number and their names, they bought them from some ring that forges cards. The only problem was that my card had already been blocked and Nordstrom's security detained them when they came back to do the return. I think that was so neat. The detective said that there were seventeen counts against them. I still have no idea where my number was stolen, but the detective told me, that if someone is going to steal your number, you have no way to stop them.

I am just glad it ended well for me, the bank and for Nordstroms.

3 comments:

L said...

Found your blog, just surfing around on blogspot.com.

I hear a lot about identity theft insurance on variuos financial talk radio shows. Maybe it would be something worth pursuing. How scary. I wonder how they got your credit card number. Are you going to put a fraud alert on your credit report??

Just Me said...

Holy Cow Lynette! I'm glad it was caught so quickly and that hey have suspects in custody!

Cyn Pip Pics said...

My dad's number was stolen by a waiter. The waiter just records the number, then sells it to fruadulant card producers who then sell it to the shopping thieves. It was a huge ring.

They travel a lot in an RV, from state to state, so it took them a while to figure out which location stole the number. They tend to pay cash a lot now.