WOT: Someone got my debit card number, and emptied my checking account Options

[nebreitling]

and the hits just keep coming..... i literally have NO time to mess with this crap.

[vent]

wake up this morning and check my balance online, need to see if some checks had cleared, and hey -- what's that? i only have $35?

someone got ahold of my debit card #, home address, etc., and opened up a paypal account on friday. and bought and bought and bought until they could buy no more. $1,126.12 to be exact.

paypal is looking to make good on it, but meanwhile, i have about 5 checks out that might not clear (one to a member here). that should prove to be fun. I LOVE BEAURACRACY!


i hope there is a special place in hell for this thief.

[/vent]

[lapuwali]

My father recently retired as the security & fraud officer at a major midwestern bank. His advice to me after I had a checkbook stolen a couple of years ago was to close the account completely and open an entirely new one.

I found out about the stolen checkbook, btw, when I got a call from the police who were holding someone who'd tried to cash checks to themselves at my bank. They'd already managed to cash a couple of other checks at another branch of the same bank 30 min before. An employee at the bank got suspicious, and called the cops. So, not all banks are full of incompetent boobs. The checkbook had been missing for as many as four days, and I hadn't noticed as I almost never write checks anymore.

Close that account, tell the bank everything, and it will all be cleared up. It's not that bad.

btw, as for the rants about debit cards, they're simply electronic checks. Signatures aren't really checked, and the thing that caught the thieves in my case was that they cashed several checks in a couple of hours for small amounts on an account that has nearly zero check activity. If I'd written more checks, they could have gotten away with more, and working my way out of it would have been a lot harder. Generally speaking, when this happens and you inform the bank promptly, they will believe you when you say you didn't make X charges. It's small change to them, they keep you as a customer. You're about as safe with a debit card as you are with a check, which is to say, not very.

Banks also employ some pretty rigorous anti-fraud measures, particularly against cards. Anything that's done that breaks your normal pattern will often be noticed. I've gotten calls from my bank asking if I made a particular charge that was flagged in their system. I was once called if I'd ordered an exhaust system (an expensive one, all stainless) from a vendor I only found out later had racked up a LOT of complaints about charging and then not getting around to actually shipping out the systems for months. That charge got flagged, so I got a courtesy call. I also didn't get an exhaust system for three months...

So much money flows through banks and credit card companies that they look on fraud and ID theft as simply the cost of doing business, and they're generally quite happy to pay up to make things right with the victims. I suppose some people have committed fraud by faking having their cards/checks stolen, but it's apparently not that big a problem, at least not in dollar terms. After all, they can't steal more than they have from the bank, and they're unlikely to get away with it more than once. Bank consolidation is also making it hard to jump from bank to bank to repeat this theft (not as many banks anymore), and even if they stole from 10 different banks, they're unlikely to steal more than $4-5K from each one, which means they (maybe) get away with a whole $50K, which is hardly enough to risk it, now is it? This kind of fraud would be interstate, which make it Federal, which means it's the FBI on your ass, and a pretty serious sentence if they nail you. The banks know this, so they just pay up with a smile.