A Cautionary Tale

Well I'm still up in OK and having fun. My cousin had a concert at a real hole in the wall bar. More on that later. The morning after the concert I went online to check my bank account because I really wanted to make sure this bar charged me correctly for my drinks because they seemed so... scuzzy. Anyways imagine my surprise when I saw multiple charges on our account for various big expenditures, one being over $500! Immediately I called hubby because he is the one that is REALLY on top of things just to make sure I hadn't forgotten about some big bill or something. Surprise! I didn't :) What did happen however was that his debit card number was copied. The good part... he literally JUST activated this new card and had only used it at one place. So we know WHERE it was stolen from. A certain famous drive-in fast food joint that has car hops that are sometimes on roller skates. So we immediately called the companies (waste of time), and then called our bank to put a stop on the card and a fraud alert on the account. Surprisingly nothing new was purchased in his name, just his card number. According to our bank, Sprint is a big cause of fraud because they do not check to make sure that the name on the bank account matches the name of the person buying their products. They check to see if money is in the account and if so then Sprint continues with the order. Today I called for an update on the fraud and found out that this thief tried to use the card at other places for things like money orders which are traceless because you can put any ol' name on the money order.

The bad news: Our account could have been emptied had we not canceled the cards at the time that we did.

The good news: We closed out our cards shortly before the money orders were purchased thus they were denied. As for Sprint... they are on my sh*t list of companies I'll never use. We are getting our money back, but that is from our bank. They are going to go and fight all of it for us.

Lesson Learned: 1) use cash for small purchases when out and about. 2) Don't buy anything from that specific carhop-drive. and 3) it is okay to be OCD about checking the bank account. It saved our butts.

Companies I'll Never Use:

Verizon Wireless

Sprint

* these companies are not on my list for unhappy phone service, they are on here due to the lack of security resulting in fraud.