1760 Company Man.
The other day my debit card got locked. Very little happened apart from that because it was locked the instant the weird charge tried to go through, but it threw my life out of order. I’ve never used it on any site that isn’t trusted and I’ve been safe for well over a decade. So my information got out some other way, which really pisses me off. I need a couple of backups, but I’ve never gotten around to doing it. Once I do that I need to freeze my credit and never think about it again hopefully.
14 Comments
It’s not the venue it’s the company. Batman said it best
Jo looks very, very, very, cute….in today’s story. :D
It’s happened to me sometimes – if you use your card at a place that has a skimmer, out in the wilds of reality and not online, the card is now compromised. My bank is pretty good and once a place has been identified as having had a skimmer at it, it goes and freezes all the cards that they can see used it to be safe; sadly they don’t take that extra step of calling to alert you (or maybe they were in the process and I just happened to discover it on my own first by trying to use it). It was most irritating though.
Freezing your credit stops new lines of credit from being opened in your name but it won’t stop existing lines of credit from being used by identity thieves.
And Bank Debit Cards are still the best way to limit the damage that can be done.
you keep the balance as close to Zero as you are comfortable with (the Digital equivalent of couch change) and only transfer the money you need into the Debit account when you actually plan to spend it somewhere (online or Meatspace) within the next hour or so.
Yes its an extra step or three.
But if the account is accessed by a 3rd Party the only info they get is for your Debit Card with the couch change on it. As opposed to your IRA that you have been feeding on and off for 15 years.
Just dont forget to have your Debit account automatically set to not only decline the transaction if the amount withdrawn would incur a negative balance but also notify you.
That way you dont get slammed for surprise overage fees.
And on an unrelated note this comments page is time stamping entries as though it were some where East of the Ural Mountains/Caspian Sea.
Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that…
The server clock has always been set in an odd way.
I dunno.
Are you sure it isn’t because the server is secretly a Ruskie black-ops device that’s piggy-backing on popular web content in order to hack the West?
Just sayin’ ;-)
Well, for me its just set to eastern time, so I’m not super worried.
My card once got locked because I kept using it to get lunch from the vending machine at work every day. And my dad’s once got locked because he paid at the grocery store, realized he forgot to get something, went back to get it, and then tried to use his card again in less than two minutes. Fraud protection is useful but kinda tetchy.
I hope you werent affected by the equifax thing… my card once got locked out because I was getting my breakfast 2 hours later than i normally do. Another time was because I was getting gas from out of state, which pissed me off because I had been purchasing things on the whole trip before that. its hard to tell what would trigger their algorithms but i guess thats a good thing.
But when location prevents having company…
(A.K.A. Yet another “my life sucks woe is me feel sorry for me” post that I’m really making just to vent.)
Apparently gas pump skimmers are becoming really common. Sparkfun wrote a great article about them fairly recently, and they also released a “skimmer scanner” Android app, so if you have an Android phone and you buy gas, you should probably get it. Article here: learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/gas-pump-skimmers