Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Identity thieves suck!

I got my new debit card last night--but now I am afraid to use it. The only logical answer to how that jerk got access to my card is they put something in the ATM that read my card while I was using it last Monday. I think it was the next day that weird charges started showing up. And the ATM I used was attached to a bank. Unbelieveable! (I hadn't used my card at all in January. And when we were in Arizona we only used our credit card.)
Our friend Ken had a similiar incident happen to him. Ken drives around the United States of America pretty often. He was in New Orleans at one point. He tried to use an ATM and it wouldn't work. (It was a free-standing ATM--I think it was on Bourbon Street.) Later he went to buy gas and that wouldn't work. So he called the bank. They told him they put a hold on his card because they noticed a lot of charges all over the country. He told them that was him since he was traveling by car. But then they told him someone tried to take 1,000 bucks out of an ATM the night before. Hello???? Everyone knows you can only get 300 bucks at a time. So they freed up his card for about 15 minutes so he could get gas and some cash. They sent his new card to the next city he would be in--at the bank. Well, that ATM he was at wasn't an ATM. Someone put it there so they could make copies of people's cards. The bank told him never to use the free-standing ones or even ones attached to a convenience store--only use ones attached to a bank. (Well, we see where that got me.)
The lesson here is to be obsessive like me and check your accounts often online.
And the unforunate part is identity thieves likely will always get away with this. I was lucky that this didn't get out of hand or ruin my credit.
Curt and I have a shredder and we shred just about everything with our names and address on it. If you send us a card we shred the envelope with our name and address and your name and address. We shred credit card applications, too. Buy a shredder at Target. They are pretty cheap.

1 Comments:

Blogger kate said...

holy crap! that totally sucks that you have to go through that. i know when i got my wallet stolen last month it was so unnerving that someone was trying to be me. i felt like i needed to go take a shower to get un-icky i had to deal with the situation. glad it worked out though.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006 12:58:00 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home