Well…it finally happened…I have fallen victim to credit card fraud. I suppose in today’s day and age, it is only a matter of time before someone that uses their credit card falls victim to having that credit card number stolen and used fraudulently (what a horrible state of affairs that it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that at some point during the life of your credit card usage it will be used fraudulently – although I don’t know if this is really true or not, it seems more and more true).
This past Wednesday afternoon, I received a phone call from a very nice woman from my bank who was asking if I had recently made a $6,000 charge to Lowes using my American Express card. Of course, I hadn’t, but my first thought at this point was maybe this is one of those scam phone calls where she then asks me to verify all my information (including card #, etc.) so that she can actually steal it during the phone call. While I was talking to her on the phone, I logged onto my bank’s website and lo and behold, saw a $6,000 charge listed there as pending from Lowes. I still made a mental note to call my bank back after the phone call was over (as well as to not provide her with my account #, etc.) but now I figured this phone call was for real and I’d been the victim of fraud.
It turns out, from what I was able to gather, that someone had used my credit card number (I was still in possession of the physical card) to order $6,000 worth of merchanidise from Lowes online and Lowes had been suspicious enough (or the name didn’t match the credit card, or some other reason) to contact my bank which then contacted me. They even had a name and address for the order (which I stupidly didn’t write down – all I remember was it was a Philadelphia address). Once I informed my bank that the purchase wasn’t mine and was fraudulent, they informed Lowes and I’m assuming Lowes cancelled the order and the merchandise never shipped. The bank then cancelled the current card I had and re-issued me a new one (they were able to FedEx it to me in 2 days thanks to the nice woman who called me – they even sent it to me at work since I knew I wouldn’t be home at the time it came and I didn’t want it sitting outside where someone could easily steal it!).
The following day, I logged on to my bank’s website and found that the $6,000 Lowes charge was gone, but there was another charge that was showing up as having occurred on 5/25 and posted on 5/27 from Sprint Nextel (it was weird that it hadn’t shown up before, but because it occurred on 5/25 it had definitely been made using the old account number and not the newly re-issued accont number). Now, the weird thing is that I’m a customer of Sprint Nextel, but definitely didn’t authorize a $400 charge to them from my credit card. I contacted Sprint Nextel’s fraud department and found out that someone had once again used my credit card fraudulently. Although this time, they were even stupider since they had used my credit card to pay their phone bill at Sprint Nextel and Sprint had all their information (their name, account #, phone #, billing address, etc.). Sprint wouldn’t release most of this information to me, but did tell me the woman’s name that was on the account as well as the fact that her address was also in Philadelphia.
I immediately contacted my bank once more and had them add this Sprint charge to the list of fraudulent charges I wouldn’t be responsible for. They said they were going to send me some sort of affidavit I had to fill out and sign stating that these charges were not made or authorized by me…of course, I was fine with doing this. Around now I also contacted the credit reporting agencies to add a fraud alert to my credit reports, and found out that without a police report I could only add one for 90 days (but with a police report, I could add one for 7 years).
Throughout all of this, my two main concerns have really been how my credit card info was illegally obtained (so I could know what mistake not to make in the future or what merchant to never again deal with) and possibly what other confidential data was out there floating around (did they have additional credit cards of mine that I’d have to cancel?). Obviously, I wanted the perpetrators caught as well, since they had committed a crime and had greatly inconvenienced me, but I wanted them caught even more so they could spill the beans about where they got my credit card number and what other information of mine they had (if any).
In order to further this, I found out that the first step was to file a police report. I contacted my local police department, and unfortunately, they came up far short. They basically told me they could take a police report, but would do nothing with it since the crimes occurred outside their jurisdiction (they apparently wouldn’t even help me interface with the local police department where the crimes did occur and basically told me that because Philadelphia was such a big city full of more serious crime, nothing would ever get done regarding this small crime). Of course, I filed the police report anyway to protect myself (and to be able to use with the credit reporting agencies and the bank).
I also attempted to reach out to Philadelphia (where my leg work had uncovered that the criminals were likely located) but their police department basically told me they wouldn’t do anything and all I could do was file a police report with my local department. At this point, I became pretty frustrated. The criminals information was pretty much only a phone call away (Sprint had their name, address, phone #, etc.), but it seemed like no law enforcement agency was willing to help me out with resolving this crime.
I decided the best bet would be to reach out once more to my bank, to Sprint, and to Lowes to see if they could help me track down the criminals and maybe push the police to get involved. I’m still waiting for a callback from the appropriate individuals at both the bank and Sprint, but I’ve been talking with an investigator from Lowes for the past day or two and he seems very willing to help me out – which is great. He is doing some investigation and is going to get back to me on Mondy (hopefully I’ll hear from my bank and Sprint at that time too), so I’ll provide some updates here as they occur.
Hopefully, the end result of all this will be that the criminals are caught, and that I find out how my data was breached and whether any more of my confidential data (other credit cards, bank account #’s, etc.) is out there or not.
(Update 6/4/08)
Totally contrary to what I was initially told, I was contacted by a Detective from my local police department today who seemed very interested in helping me out with this crime. He clarified a lot of the information I had already given in the police report, and asked for some new information. He was going to be drafting a subpoena to get Sprint to release the information about the person who used my credit card to pay their cell phone account – so this could be a very promising turn of events in catching “the bad guys”