This Is Why I Hate Credit Cards....

magkelly · 10-02-2012, 07:25 AM

Woke up this morning to find the Visa bill had jumped $800 plus change in one night and I have no idea of why. Our credit union put a hold on the card and they're checking to see who it was as I type, but someone just charged the equivalent of a K-30 body on my credit card and it definitely wasn't me. What gets me is that they let them do it. We got an email overbalance notice in our inbox from the credit union and that's how I found out.

Whoever it was actually charged way more than the balance I could have used and they still put it through. So far as I know we haven't gotten a higher available notice balance lately. I'm furious. $800 in one night? You'd think someone there might have flagged that as a tad suspicious seeing as we hardly ever charge anything over $100 at any given time...

You can't see it but I'm just sitting here laughing in disgust and frustration. This has been a bad few months. This is just too freakin much!!! First the cat costs me $500 at the vet. Then I have to have an emergency tooth extraction to the tune of $350. Then the deep freezer and we lose the $600 worth of food that we've painstakingly built up over the past few months in prep for Fall and Winter. Now I've likely got someone out there with my/our credit card number going to town with it and causing over balance fees?

Lovely.....just lovely....and what makes it worse is this is the card I share with my parents. The one that I am oh so careful about using because it's actually their card even though I am on it. No, the folks didn't hit the casino last night. No one charged a dime so far as we know. Me, I don't even charge dinner on this card sans permission. So a big charge on this has to mean someone has snagged the card info and is using it illegally. The big question now is how did they get it and where? Thank goodness it was the CU card though. I would imagine 30 years with them will count for something.

Whoever this is I totally hope they nail the bas-!

Last edited by magkelly; 10-02-2012 at 07:32 AM.

Ari · 10-02-2012, 07:29 AM

I was flying to Arizona while two teenagers bought 1700 worth of barbeque grills at a home depot. I called the store and asked them how they paid for it. He said they had a credit card number written on a piece of paper. And I asked him how on earth he thought that it was ok to sell teenagers anything with that kind of info. His answer? He never had any problems before......I had to show my bank my boarding pass to prove that I didn't make those purchases. Absolutely ridiculous.........At least they credited my account immediately. Which didn't help the fact that when I landed, I had no money to pay for a cab to the hotel.....

Clavius · 10-02-2012, 07:40 AM

How does this work in the US? Here the CC company would refund the money as soon as it becomes clear you weren't the one spending it.

Anyway, I hope they catch him/her too!

Edit... OMG, $500,- to cure a cat!?!

magkelly · 10-02-2012, 07:42 AM

When I went to SF last year I almost didn't buy traveler's checks. I took out some cash and figured I'd go with the credit cards instead. Then I thought about what might happen if something happened and I couldn't use my credit cards and I went to the CU and got those traveler's checks even though they made it almost impossible to buy them. I got to SF and I couldn't hardly get anyone to accept them, but at least I had the backup. The problem with a cashless society is stuff like this happening. When you only carry only plastic you are at the mercy of situations like this. I just really hope it's only the one credit card that they got and not our soc security numbers et all too.

Medium FormatPro · 10-02-2012, 07:50 AM

The entire credit card industry almost reminds me of how Wall Street banking went wrong.

The level of any credit card in terms of security is just plain trivial. It's like building a bank vault of of Lego's

magkelly · 10-02-2012, 08:01 AM - **1 Like**

Originally posted by Clavius

Edit... OMG, $500,- to cure a cat!?!

Nah, just to check out a cat and give him some darned shots. They can't cure him unfortunately, not at his age and with his health issues. I dearly love this cat believe me. I've raised him practically since birth. He's my big baby but there are days I practically curse his existence.

He has not been a cheap cat to have. I've put the equivalent of a used car into his little kitty hide over the years. I can't afford to go to the doctor myself partly because of him, laugh. He's had surgery three times, been seriously sick at least half a dozen times with kitty cystitis and he actually has a recurring cyst that they just cannot operate on. He's had arthritis in his spine and hips since he was young and he ran into a heavy table broke his hip. He can't jump like my other cat can and he moves a bit slow sometimes.

He got stung this year by a wasp. Got real sick. We also think he may have actually had a minor stroke. He had a week where he was way out of it, he couldn't hardly walk, and his head was shaking like he had Parkinson's. But to our vet's amazement he actually recovered and now other than the odd tremor or twitch it's like it never happened. He was thisclose to being put down this last time though. I probably should go there, and likely will sooner or later but for a cat with his health problems he actually does very well when he's not having a major crisis. Vet says he's good, considering...

It's very hard with him. I really don't want to see him suffer but I don't want to put him down before his time either and he's always been a real fighter. We've been through so much he and I losing him will just about kill me emotionally when it does happen. He's a really terrific cat other than the fact that he's cost me a small fortune in vet bills. He's 15 this November and has actually outlived my vet's prediction of his lifespan by almost 5 years....

Worth it, ah yeah...

causey · 10-02-2012, 08:30 AM

5 years ago a guy in Northern Massachusetts bought $2500 worth of golf equipment in my name. I had used my credit card in a restaurant in a small fishing town. I had to exchange tons of messages with American Express and mail them proofs--in the end, they took the loss.

vonBaloney · 10-02-2012, 08:56 AM

I'm surprised you guys have had so much trouble with the banks or Visa or whoever having to prove this and that. Anytime anything has happened like this to me or my family they:

A) Called first to verify the transaction and it was stopped right there.

B) Or it was solved with a single phone call -- no proof of anything needed. (The charges are almost always online or in another city -- it is generally pretty obvious.)

They all offer fraud protection these days (e.g. you are not liable) since ID theft is so prevalent. It is a pain because they have to cancel the card and send you a new one, but no big deal otherwise. People are very paranoid about online transactions (less so than they used to be I think) but stolen numbers are usually from local use -- restaurants in particular...

Tom S. · 10-02-2012, 08:58 AM

No sense in getting upset. Your credit union will get it straightened out and take care of the fees. Here's some info in the mean time. Unless you belong to a mega-huge credit union, your credit card isn't actually from them, but from a third party. That's no big deal, just economics, but what I'm leading to is this third party no doubt processes thousands (tens or even hundreds) a day and despite the wonder of computers, fraudulent charges do get by. How po'd would you have been if you were standing at your local camera shop with a brand new K-30 in your hand and the clerk told you the card was denied because that expenditure was out of character for you? My point is sometimes the credit card people (whom I have no love for, BTW) are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Get a nice cappuccino, put your feet up and relax. It will all work out.

reeftool · 10-02-2012, 09:41 AM

By law (in most states), you are not liable for the charges and this should be fairly easy to resolve. Since you discovered it quickly, it should be easier for them to track down who used your card number but these problems usually happen because someone hacked a retail store and got records of all the transactions and all the card numbers are then sold. I've had a half dozen credit and debit cards replaced in the past few years due to security breaches. Master Card and Visa have been hacked themselves and thousands of numbers stolen. Unfortunately, this is the world we now live in. It got worse when wi-fi caught on. Guys were sitting in mall parking lots recording transactions.

**Just1MoreDave** · 10-02-2012, 10:11 AM

The worst part is, most of us are quietly living within the rules, then sometimes suffering the suspicious glares when doing a legitimate transaction anyway.

My wife used to have an American Express card. One month in 1997 there was a charge on it for just less than $10 US, but in New Zealand dollars. She called, they said they'd fix it. Repeat that for several months, except sometimes the charge was in Australian dollars. To me, it was obvious. Some Amex employee had gathered many card numbers and was hitting them all for small charges that would avoid internal security checks and not be noticed. American Express was at first not interested in the problem, then a few more phone calls got the charges reversed, then months later, decided to investigate with their fraud team. The team wanted to keep the number alive to track the charges. By then, my wife was tired of Amex, so she cancelled the card entirely and let them bumble along. Years later, collection agencies would call her for charges that happened well after the cancellation. Copies of the bills were sent to her, with the address of the Amex fraud investigation department clearly on the bill. It has never cost her any money but she isn't going near an Amex card for life. I doubt the criminal was ever caught.

wildweasel · 10-02-2012, 10:52 AM

I was caught out a couple of years ago by a card skimmer at a cashpoint. My bank was pretty good as it goes - I reported the fraudulent activity and within an hour they'd credited the money back to my account. All I had to do beyond that was to sign document saying that the money had been stolen from me. They caught the guy as well - he'd used my card to sign up for porn sites, cam shows, dating agencies and other such things so it must have been pretty embarrassing for him.

magkelly · 10-02-2012, 11:39 AM

We have used this card online, at Amazon and it was the card I have attached to our account Goodwill Online but other than that we don't use this card online. Locally we used it once at the gas station around the corner the same one we've been using forever, at Goodwill, and I think once at my local grocery store. The person who tried to use it went to a big dept store in the local mall here and used it to buy electronics or something like that apparently. So they are local, not someone from online. I'm betting it's either someone new at our gas station or someone at Goodwill here which really ticks me off thinking about it. But regardless they're toast because the police and our credit union are both on it and we're not going to just let this one slide. The next time this idiot tries to use our card the police will be on them like flies on dung...

SpecialK · 10-02-2012, 12:04 PM

I process and review credit card orders every day. Some fraud is obvious, others are not.

pingflood · 10-02-2012, 12:16 PM

Why even bother with credit cards in the first place?

10-02-2012, 07:25 AM	#1
magkelly Veteran Member Join Date: May 2010 Photos: Gallery Posts: 5,901	This Is Why I Hate Credit Cards.... Woke up this morning to find the Visa bill had jumped $800 plus change in one night and I have no idea of why. Our credit union put a hold on the card and they're checking to see who it was as I type, but someone just charged the equivalent of a K-30 body on my credit card and it definitely wasn't me. What gets me is that they let them do it. We got an email overbalance notice in our inbox from the credit union and that's how I found out. Whoever it was actually charged way more than the balance I could have used and they still put it through. So far as I know we haven't gotten a higher available notice balance lately. I'm furious. $800 in one night? You'd think someone there might have flagged that as a tad suspicious seeing as we hardly ever charge anything over $100 at any given time... You can't see it but I'm just sitting here laughing in disgust and frustration. This has been a bad few months. This is just too freakin much!!! First the cat costs me $500 at the vet. Then I have to have an emergency tooth extraction to the tune of $350. Then the deep freezer and we lose the $600 worth of food that we've painstakingly built up over the past few months in prep for Fall and Winter. Now I've likely got someone out there with my/our credit card number going to town with it and causing over balance fees? Lovely.....just lovely....and what makes it worse is this is the card I share with my parents. The one that I am oh so careful about using because it's actually their card even though I am on it. No, the folks didn't hit the casino last night. No one charged a dime so far as we know. Me, I don't even charge dinner on this card sans permission. So a big charge on this has to mean someone has snagged the card info and is using it illegally. The big question now is how did they get it and where? Thank goodness it was the CU card though. I would imagine 30 years with them will count for something. Whoever this is I totally hope they nail the bas-! Last edited by magkelly; 10-02-2012 at 07:32 AM.

10-02-2012, 07:50 AM	#5
Medium FormatPro Banned Join Date: Mar 2012 Location: Charleston & Pittsburgh Photos: Albums Posts: 1,668	The entire credit card industry almost reminds me of how Wall Street banking went wrong. The level of any credit card in terms of security is just plain trivial. It's like building a bank vault of of Lego's Last edited by Parallax; 10-02-2012 at 03:14 PM.

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10-02-2012, 07:29 AM	#2
Ari Veteran Member Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Freehold, NJ Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 856	I was flying to Arizona while two teenagers bought 1700 worth of barbeque grills at a home depot. I called the store and asked them how they paid for it. He said they had a credit card number written on a piece of paper. And I asked him how on earth he thought that it was ok to sell teenagers anything with that kind of info. His answer? He never had any problems before......I had to show my bank my boarding pass to prove that I didn't make those purchases. Absolutely ridiculous.........At least they credited my account immediately. Which didn't help the fact that when I landed, I had no money to pay for a cab to the hotel.....

10-02-2012, 07:40 AM	#3
Clavius Veteran Member Join Date: Feb 2011 Location: De Klundert Photos: Gallery Posts: 4,150	How does this work in the US? Here the CC company would refund the money as soon as it becomes clear you weren't the one spending it. Anyway, I hope they catch him/her too! Edit... OMG, $500,- to cure a cat!?!

10-02-2012, 07:42 AM	#4
magkelly Veteran Member Join Date: May 2010 Photos: Gallery Posts: 5,901 Original Poster	When I went to SF last year I almost didn't buy traveler's checks. I took out some cash and figured I'd go with the credit cards instead. Then I thought about what might happen if something happened and I couldn't use my credit cards and I went to the CU and got those traveler's checks even though they made it almost impossible to buy them. I got to SF and I couldn't hardly get anyone to accept them, but at least I had the backup. The problem with a cashless society is stuff like this happening. When you only carry only plastic you are at the mercy of situations like this. I just really hope it's only the one credit card that they got and not our soc security numbers et all too.

10-02-2012, 08:01 AM - 1 Like	#6
magkelly Veteran Member Join Date: May 2010 Photos: Gallery Posts: 5,901 Original Poster	Originally posted by Clavius Edit... OMG, $500,- to cure a cat!?! Nah, just to check out a cat and give him some darned shots. They can't cure him unfortunately, not at his age and with his health issues. I dearly love this cat believe me. I've raised him practically since birth. He's my big baby but there are days I practically curse his existence. He has not been a cheap cat to have. I've put the equivalent of a used car into his little kitty hide over the years. I can't afford to go to the doctor myself partly because of him, laugh. He's had surgery three times, been seriously sick at least half a dozen times with kitty cystitis and he actually has a recurring cyst that they just cannot operate on. He's had arthritis in his spine and hips since he was young and he ran into a heavy table broke his hip. He can't jump like my other cat can and he moves a bit slow sometimes. He got stung this year by a wasp. Got real sick. We also think he may have actually had a minor stroke. He had a week where he was way out of it, he couldn't hardly walk, and his head was shaking like he had Parkinson's. But to our vet's amazement he actually recovered and now other than the odd tremor or twitch it's like it never happened. He was thisclose to being put down this last time though. I probably should go there, and likely will sooner or later but for a cat with his health problems he actually does very well when he's not having a major crisis. Vet says he's good, considering... It's very hard with him. I really don't want to see him suffer but I don't want to put him down before his time either and he's always been a real fighter. We've been through so much he and I losing him will just about kill me emotionally when it does happen. He's a really terrific cat other than the fact that he's cost me a small fortune in vet bills. He's 15 this November and has actually outlived my vet's prediction of his lifespan by almost 5 years.... Worth it, ah yeah...

10-02-2012, 08:30 AM	#7
causey Veteran Member Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Arlington, VA Photos: Albums Posts: 3,757	5 years ago a guy in Northern Massachusetts bought $2500 worth of golf equipment in my name. I had used my credit card in a restaurant in a small fishing town. I had to exchange tons of messages with American Express and mail them proofs--in the end, they took the loss.

10-02-2012, 08:56 AM	#8
vonBaloney Pentaxian Join Date: Oct 2011 Location: Albuquerque, NM Posts: 6,029	I'm surprised you guys have had so much trouble with the banks or Visa or whoever having to prove this and that. Anytime anything has happened like this to me or my family they: A) Called first to verify the transaction and it was stopped right there. B) Or it was solved with a single phone call -- no proof of anything needed. (The charges are almost always online or in another city -- it is generally pretty obvious.) They all offer fraud protection these days (e.g. you are not liable) since ID theft is so prevalent. It is a pain because they have to cancel the card and send you a new one, but no big deal otherwise. People are very paranoid about online transactions (less so than they used to be I think) but stolen numbers are usually from local use -- restaurants in particular...

10-02-2012, 08:58 AM	#9
Tom S. Veteran Member Join Date: May 2008 Location: S.E. Michigan Photos: Albums Posts: 4,317	No sense in getting upset. Your credit union will get it straightened out and take care of the fees. Here's some info in the mean time. Unless you belong to a mega-huge credit union, your credit card isn't actually from them, but from a third party. That's no big deal, just economics, but what I'm leading to is this third party no doubt processes thousands (tens or even hundreds) a day and despite the wonder of computers, fraudulent charges do get by. How po'd would you have been if you were standing at your local camera shop with a brand new K-30 in your hand and the clerk told you the card was denied because that expenditure was out of character for you? My point is sometimes the credit card people (whom I have no love for, BTW) are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Get a nice cappuccino, put your feet up and relax. It will all work out.

10-02-2012, 09:41 AM	#10
reeftool Pentaxian Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: Upstate New York Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 9,554	By law (in most states), you are not liable for the charges and this should be fairly easy to resolve. Since you discovered it quickly, it should be easier for them to track down who used your card number but these problems usually happen because someone hacked a retail store and got records of all the transactions and all the card numbers are then sold. I've had a half dozen credit and debit cards replaced in the past few years due to security breaches. Master Card and Visa have been hacked themselves and thousands of numbers stolen. Unfortunately, this is the world we now live in. It got worse when wi-fi caught on. Guys were sitting in mall parking lots recording transactions.

10-02-2012, 10:11 AM	#11
Just1MoreDave Site Supporter Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Aurora, CO Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 6,340	The worst part is, most of us are quietly living within the rules, then sometimes suffering the suspicious glares when doing a legitimate transaction anyway. My wife used to have an American Express card. One month in 1997 there was a charge on it for just less than $10 US, but in New Zealand dollars. She called, they said they'd fix it. Repeat that for several months, except sometimes the charge was in Australian dollars. To me, it was obvious. Some Amex employee had gathered many card numbers and was hitting them all for small charges that would avoid internal security checks and not be noticed. American Express was at first not interested in the problem, then a few more phone calls got the charges reversed, then months later, decided to investigate with their fraud team. The team wanted to keep the number alive to track the charges. By then, my wife was tired of Amex, so she cancelled the card entirely and let them bumble along. Years later, collection agencies would call her for charges that happened well after the cancellation. Copies of the bills were sent to her, with the address of the Amex fraud investigation department clearly on the bill. It has never cost her any money but she isn't going near an Amex card for life. I doubt the criminal was ever caught.

10-02-2012, 10:52 AM	#12
wildweasel Inactive Account Join Date: Jan 2011 Location: Plymouth Posts: 359	I was caught out a couple of years ago by a card skimmer at a cashpoint. My bank was pretty good as it goes - I reported the fraudulent activity and within an hour they'd credited the money back to my account. All I had to do beyond that was to sign document saying that the money had been stolen from me. They caught the guy as well - he'd used my card to sign up for porn sites, cam shows, dating agencies and other such things so it must have been pretty embarrassing for him.

10-02-2012, 11:39 AM	#13
magkelly Veteran Member Join Date: May 2010 Photos: Gallery Posts: 5,901 Original Poster	We have used this card online, at Amazon and it was the card I have attached to our account Goodwill Online but other than that we don't use this card online. Locally we used it once at the gas station around the corner the same one we've been using forever, at Goodwill, and I think once at my local grocery store. The person who tried to use it went to a big dept store in the local mall here and used it to buy electronics or something like that apparently. So they are local, not someone from online. I'm betting it's either someone new at our gas station or someone at Goodwill here which really ticks me off thinking about it. But regardless they're toast because the police and our credit union are both on it and we're not going to just let this one slide. The next time this idiot tries to use our card the police will be on them like flies on dung...

10-02-2012, 12:04 PM	#14
SpecialK Pentaxian Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: So California Photos: Gallery Posts: 16,480	I process and review credit card orders every day. Some fraud is obvious, others are not.

10-02-2012, 12:16 PM	#15
pingflood Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: Borås, Sweden Photos: Gallery Posts: 3,169	Why even bother with credit cards in the first place?