My credit union called my house the other day and left a worried-sounding message on my answering machine stating that they were tracking some suspicious activity on my credit card. I finally got ahold of them today only to find out that, at some point in the recent past, some scumsucker used an illicit swipe machine to “skim” my credit card and had used a duplicate of my card to attempt to purchase $1,200 worth of gift cards in Jacksonville, FL this week.
They caught the transactions in time to deny three of them, but up to $600-worth of the illegal activity was actually posted to my account, so now I have to go through a long dispute process. In the meantime, I’m going to go back over my transactions and try to determine which particular place of business may be at fault. If I do figure out which one it is, I will be contacting the owners and then publishing my results to this space if they do not address my concerns.
Grrrrr.
May The Fires Of A Thousand Suns Give Them Melanomas Of Varying Sizes, Shapes And Severity
Someone managed to get hold of my card several years ago. Fortunately their initial attempted purchase was about 4 times greater than my credit limit. I hope those bastages got caught.
[…] After learning that I had been the victim of credit card "skimming" fraud, I found out that the dispute process is nowhere near as easy as card vendors (particularly American Express) make it seem in their advertisements. A portion of the procedure involves, apparently, getting an official dispute statement notarized in a timely fashion. Not being a notary public myself, I had to seek out the services of such a professional. Fortunately, my coworkers alerted me to the fact that each and every Commerce Bank location has a notary public on staff. […]