[ale] Ouch. Stay away from proprietary technology.

[Alex Carver]

The biggest solution: dump debit cards.  You have protections by law for
credit cards which do not apply to debit cards and, in many cases, the
credit card issuer has better policies on the books for fraudulent
activity.

You also avoid the "temporary charge" situation that is usually found on
debit cards.  Many merchants post a charge to debit cards well above the
amount you saw at the checkout terminal as a hold.  When this happens,
it acts like that amount is withdrawn already leaving it unavailable for
further purchases.

After that, watch for skimmers.  Take time to look at the device you're
about to use, tug on the card reader, whatever you need to spot a
skimmer.  If you find it, report it and go somewhere else.  It's very
easy for someone to install a skimmer on things like gas pumps and ATMs,
especially ATMs that are private brand (inside stores) or in foreign
countries.



On 2016-02-07 20:51, Scott Castaline wrote:
> Back in 2009 I had a similar situation happen to me. At the time Iwe
> didn't have any credit cards so this happened to my debit card. I had
> been down in Tampa and I had no problems until I got back home. I had
> filled the rental car with gas before turning it using that card with no
> problem. My wife picks me up at the airport and I filled our van up with
> gas again using the same card. We get over to Kroger's I went to pick up
> a prescription from the pharmacy and got declined. At first didn't think
> anything of and used my wife's card no problem. Later I go to use my
> card again to check out at Krogers and was declined again even when they
> entered the card info manually. I called the bank (then it was ING
> Direct and is now Capital One 360) and they didn't know why but my card
> had been frozen. As it turned out it was the company that handled their
> clearing and approvals, that company informed us that between the time
> that I got gas and then the first declined attempted there were 5 credit
> requests totaling $30,000 that were very far apart from each other in
> Mexico at the same time. So all charges were declined and my card was
> frozen. A week later I got a new card.
> 
> Nine months later, I had made it a daily practice to go online with my
> banks and one morning I see several charges totaling $5,000 on my new
> card. This time I had to do all the leg work to resolve the issues. The
> worst part was that night I several bills scheduled which didn't happen
> and by the time I got it straightened out I was late an several of them
> getting clobbered with late fees. All but one merchant wound up
> canceling the orders, Champion Sports was very quick to ship out the
> order with in 2 hours, but did credit my account. Then I did mange to
> get the late fees waived after several phone calls and getting escalated
> to upper management gophers. Fortunately we were able to re-establish
> our credit and then had a couple of credit cards and stopped using the
> debit card immediately.
> 
> Now it seems almost like clock work every 9 months we're getting fraud
> alerts on one of our cards so we don't have card numbers long enough to
> expire. At one time we had 2 cards locked at about the same time, and
> that was just in the last 6 months.
> 
> On 02/07/2016 02:19 PM, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
>> Apple?  If you know my first and last name, it will take a few phone
>> calls to find me in the world.
>>
>> Credit card info?  Anywhere the card was used, that data could have been
>> stolen. It is my "go-to" CC when traveling.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 02/07/16 12:08, James Sumners wrote:
>>> On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 11:32 AM, Boris Borisov <bugyatl at gmail.com
>>> <mailto:bugyatl at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>      How they got that info. Any clues.
>>>
>>>
>>> Probably from the credit card information. Rather tough to buy something
>>> in NY and Miami on the same day without a large time gap. They probably
>>> flagged the fraud quicker than the bank and took action.
>>>
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