Pain in the Patootie

[gerisullivan]

Wednesday afternoon I spent a lovely couple of hours with debgeisler and elainebrennan visiting the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The museum was great, a welcome oasis of air-conditioned comfort, calm, and visual stimulation on a hot summer afternoon in the city. Thanks for suggesting it, Deb! I look forward to returning again. Soon, I hope.

Then I tried to use my credit card to pay for our parking.

The credit card reader at the MFA wasn't cooperating. After two "card denied" messages, I stuck a $20 in the slot and soon walked out with the validated parking card and my change.

I didn't think any more about the card not working until I arrived home shortly after midnight to find a message on my answering machine from the card's fraud services unit. Oh. Seems there was a $14.53 purchase from Monday night that flagged something in their system. Hmmm. "Let me think," I said. The charge was from an off-name publishing company. I might well have made some small purchase online. Hmmm. We reviewed a couple of other charges from the last day or two; they were legit. We left the card on hold so I could investigate further.

An hour of research later, and I was still plagued by a hind-brain recollection of something, but none of my records searches turned up anything likely. I was going to sleep on it, dreading the need to change over all of my automatic payments if the charge was fraudulent. (The routine in such cases is to cancel the card and issue a new one.)

I finally remembered to go take a closer look at all of the recent charges. Eek. The $14.53 use two days ago was peanuts compared to the fraudulent $160 and $170 charges from two different sources on consecutive days last week. Okay, that was utterly clear. I called fraud services back and canceled the card. I then quickly changed the account info on my cable bill over to a still-working card, and sent the cable company email telling them what happened and asking them to confirm that they have the new info in time for my July 28th billing date, or to tell me I'll need to do a manual payment this month.

That was the urgent one. If my memory serves, I have at least a few more days before any more automated payments are due. More like a week, I think. I'll sleep, then make my way through changing account info on everything else. Fortunately, it should be easier to remember everything than it usually is -- I just went through this entire process updating the expiration date on the card a few weeks ago.

I didn't eat at or even visit The Forks when I was in Winnipeg last month. (A friend had his credit card info stolen when dining there last July.) I don't even know if my info was pulled from an in person transaction or something online. All I know is that enough of my old card info is out there to get two fraudulent charges through from two different sources last week before tripping up on a much smaller fraudulent charge this week. It could have been most anything, I suppose. What I know is that changing everything is annoying. Not as annoying as if the fraudulent charges had numbered dozens, hundreds, or thousands, or if it had hit while I was out of the country or otherwise still on the road, but still....



Onward.

Comments

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I've had almost the opposite issue, in having legitimate charges that look suspicious get flagged. For instance, the mobile phone rental company in Japan put a $0.01 charge on the card to confirm that it worked after I made a reservation.

I've made a point of contacting my credit cards and the two banks with which I have accounts to tell them that I will be in Japan from August 27-September 18 and that charges from Japan during that time should be legitimate. I don't want to have my cards go dead on me while I'm in Japan!