Here’s the scoop on the latest reason the blog has been crickets-chirping-silent the past little while…

On the heels of the living room flood (the landlord has replaced the roof, he is also replacing the carpet in the living room, and we are NOT moving) came the latest bit of fun and excitement — a 7:30 AM call from VISA fraud protection wanting to verify some $1100 worth of charges, which had been ran up in the previous hour on the credit card number linked to my debit card! I instantly began to (a) digest my own esophagus and (b) blurt out some words for which I had to subsequently apologize to the poor VISA phone rep.

We got the card shut down immediately, and the rest of the day was spent calling the bank, filing a police report, and trying to stop the orders from shipping. You see, you can’t dispute a charge until after it has posted; with this being, as I mentioned, a debit card, once they did post, our checking and savings accounts would be decimated. And the fun would not stop there… all of our bills and utilities are scheduled to autopay, so a cascading chain of angry utility companies and creditors would have been the next result

Besides demonstrating the sad fact that we are apparently a Motorola Razr phone and an iPod from financial ruin, this brought up the question of how the number was compromised to begin with, a question that still remains unanswered.  This also perhaps raises the less relevant question,  ‘holy crap, what kind of freakin’ phone costs $750′?

Overstock.com was great; they had already flagged the iPod order as suspicious. Motorola Direct on the other hand said that the order for the aforementioned $750 phone had ‘already processed’ and there was nothing they could do, even though it had not shipped out yet. “Can’t someone just make a call to the warehouse and take the box out of the shipping queue?” I asked, and was informed that it just didn’t work that way. I finally made it clear I was going to make a nuisance of myself until I talked to someone who *could* do something, and got transferred to their consumer advocacy rep who did manage to get the order halted, thankfully. I also had to call iTunes and some internet provider in NJ; the jerk who got the card (Joy says it sounds like the M.O. of a teenage girl) had apparently been pretty busy in that hour.

We still ended up overdrafting our checking the next day (thankfully we have overdraft protection from savings) because even though the charges were not going to come out after all, we didn’t realize the authorizations had the $1100 on ‘hold’ and they would not expire for 3-5 days. We had to use credit for groceries which we really hated doing; we’ve not used credit cards in months and actually just paid off and closed one card last week. I could almost hear someone at Bank of America humming “Reunited” when I swiped the card. I’ve been monitoring all of our accounts for anything weird but so far it looks like a single compromised account number, not a larger identity theft situation.

Anyone who knows me well knows I have a teeny, tiny, issue with OCD… in particular a phobia of losing my wallet. I have to check for it throughout the day, even when I am in the car and have already checked, like, ten minutes before. Yes, on a rational level I know full well that it’s unlikely to jump out of my pocket and escape a moving vehicle,  but hey, who says OCD makes sense? As far as compulsive behavior goes, it’s relatively benign; I am not missing work counting all my socks or anything, right? But I digress… anyway, I have this terrible fear that I will find my wallet missing and someone will Wreak Financial Havoc with it. Obviously, this incident tapped into my biggest phobia: in spite of knowing where my wallet is every second of the day, someone did it anyway — and they didn’t even actually need the wallet to do it.

I came a little unglued the day this happened, and at first there was maybe some ranting about burying all my money in mason jars and paying for everything in cash and maybe retreating to a compound in Montana. But I actually manage money better when I have Quicken to nag me show me important financial trends. Like when it pops up and says “I see you have been to Asheville Pizza again this week, would you like me to schedule that as a recurring transaction?” …I couldn’t get that kind of passive-aggressive sarcasm from a mason jar. Besides it gets really cold in Montana, I hear.

The real lesson I think that was learned was not to use a debit card for credit transactions. We would not have been liable for the fraudulent charges, our panic was caused by the fact that in the 10-30 days it would take to dispute them, the money would have come out of our checking and savings instead of being charges sitting on a credit account.

As to how it happened… well, the card was never out of my possession (I know this because I check, see ‘wallet OCD’, above) but the number could have been stolen from a hacked online database or copied by an employee or someone else who had access to the records of somewhere we bought something. One of the online retailers said the charge for their online order had originated from Akron, Ohio but that doesn’t ring any immediate bells. I just hope that is the end of it. The authorizations finally came off yesterday and our money is once again ours. We were very, very lucky that it wasn’t worse.