Stolen Credit Card Number...Again

[clsanchez77]

Here we go again. Going through credit card transactions from our Christmas Orlando trip and found a $15 order to Checkers....in Baton Rouge. Several questions remain in my head.

Checkers? So many other places to grab a better burger with a stolen credit card. We like Mooyah's in Metairie, which comes to the next question

Baton Rouge? That stuck out on our statement like a sore thumb? If you're going to steal the card, you need to know the zip code lol. A checker's in the New Orleans area might have slipped by, except they don't exist and are now all Rally's. A Rally's charge in Metairie might not have been noticed...except $15? I wish I could feed my family for $15. Can't even do that with just eggs anymore.

Using a stolen credit card is a criminal offense. If you are going to commit, then you need to commit. Do a nice fully equipped reef tank and host a LARC event! $15 at a burger place? I have a family of 6, I can't get out of a Rally's for less than $60! You gotta know your victim!

Chase made us whole, but from the barrage of questions, I wonder if people are now fraudulently claiming fraudulent charges LOL. For example, they noticed from the card history that we were traveling by vehicle during this time. We had to explain to them that Baton Rouge is not on the way from New Orleans to Orlando lol.

2023 is going to be a great ride!

 

[CenlaReefer]

Chris, I am sorry to hear this. Was your card physically stolen? I guess they could have used a mobile app to make the Checkers purchase.

How do you think it happened? Years ago, someone may have taken a photo of the front and back of my card when going to a Sonic or other drive-thru. Our bank called us when they noticed questionable charges. Now, I hate handing my card to a server... even at a nice restaurant. In 2022, it was the first time I ever observed waiters and waitresses with mobile devices to charge you right at the table. That is genius! If the Sonic menu display and computer is not working to take my card, I will change parking spots rather than hand my card off.

 

[clsanchez77]

Nah, they got the number from somewhere. No telling where they got it from, you can buy these things on the internet now. I have had cards stolen several times before. Once was a Home Depot and they were attempting to use the card while I was still there.

Another one I remember was while I was staying in a Marriott hotel in Washington DC, my card was being used across the street at the Hilton. That was one of the hardest fraud claims I had to make. They almost made me return to DC SMH. To make the situation worse, this was right after Hurricane Katrina.

The most entertaining one was a couple of years ago when someone ran up $6k in charges at a Verizon store using my wife's ID; opened a new account. Verizon was willing to take us to court over it. At one point, we were receiving three conflicting letters from three different departments . I was not having any problems watching this play out. They finally came to their senses though.

 

[smileyjoe]

It's happened to my boss twice in the last three months. He finally got the new card and a week later there were fraudulent charges to Verizon.

 

[clsanchez77]

It's happened to my boss twice in the last three months. He finally got the new card and a week later there were fraudulent charges to Verizon.

Sometimes I wonder how they can move so fast.

When I worked in retail pre- and during my college days, I quickly moved up the ranks and was a front-end manager. I was at the San-A-Center on Vets and we had K-Mart to the west and a Steinmart to the east. Back then (90's), credit cards were swiped in a separate machine and the credit card receipt, with number, was placed in the cash drawer. Well cashiers maintained control of their cash drawers from punch in to punch out, including breaks. We had discovered that some cashiers were taking the credit card receipts out of the drawer during lunch and using them to make purchases and K-Mart. Their co-conspirators would punch in the card numbers off the slips, and in turn, would come to our store with their credit slips and do the same. It took several months to figure this out. You have to remember that online banking and fraud detection were not things yet. You had to wait until the end of the month and then review your statements when they came in the mail. Then, most of our customers did shop at 2 or even all 3 of these stores on a regular basis. So a charge at one store might not stand out to you if you regularly shopped there. What was tipping customers off though was when the numbers getting stolen from both stores were duplicates and customers were realizing "I might have shopped at both stores that week, but I did not shop at both of them twice that week." The whole sting operations was wicked and it was exciting to be a part of that. Oh, and btw, we had very few cameras back then too. It all had to pre-planned and witnessed in order to prosecute this the way we did. I think we put 20 employees in jail between the two stores. Unfortunately we never got a complete handle on how much was stolen in total as people had to come forward and report it and I suspect a good bit of the customers never knew.

Not a lot of memories I enjoyed from my retail days, but helping to break this up was among the favorites.

 

[BluewaterLa]

My discover card was hijacked recently, took on three charges in other states on the same day.
Luckily discover emailed and texted my wife immediately flagging suspicious activity so she was able to log into our account to make sure it was not a scam message with links and got the same alert.
Discover took care of the charges and went through our billing cycle checking to make sure there was no other charges that did not belong.
The bad part was taking over a week to get new cards to us, this card is used to auto pay a fair amount of our monthly expenses.

In a digital world it is only getting easier for criminals to steal information from institutions, businesses and individuals without ever getting caught by the law or paying the price in prison. Data breaches are happening all the time and more frequently. T Mobil just released that 36 million customers information has just been hacked and this is just the small stuff going on lately.