Thursday, October 02, 2008

I've Been Financially Hacked!

Boom and I were enjoying our morning walk in the lovely cool sunshine, puzzling over why some dog walkers were wearing gloves and scarves when clearly, a t-shirt and sandals was the correct choice, when my phone rang.

[My NEW phone. Materialistic of me, but I love it. I've spent an absurd amount of money downloading ringtones (and accidentally, one ringback tone) and assigning pictures to my contact list. The best part? SIM card capability means that when I go to Ireland and Scotland next year (when, not if, people), I can call and tell everyone about while I'm there.]

Caller ID said an 800 number, so I ignored it and kept walking. Upon arriving home I checked the message and it was my bank requesting a call back about some charges on my credit card.

Well that's odd. Haven't used my credit card recently. I start dialing and pull up my online account.

Holy crap! Almost $20,000 from 6 charges! The nice lady at USAA confirmed that my last authorized charge was $19.88 to Netflix and not $5,000 to a company I have never heard of and set to work deleting them.

So whoever hacked my credit card attempted to make three $5,000 payments (donations?) to a religious charity in Baltimore. Like that would ever happen. Not even if it was for born again dogs. The other three charges ranging from $1300 to $2600 were to a travel agency in Finland specializing in safari adventures -- reindeer in Lappland! Again, not me. My bank doesn't know how it happened. I'm just glad they have fraud filters in place. Really glad.

Tell all your single friends, CHECK YOUR ONLINE ACCOUNT FREQUENTLY!


XO, JamieSmitten

p.s. Donated my pint of top grade A-Negative CMV- blood in 9 minutes tonight. (I rock!)
p.p.s. I'd rather give ten pints without a break than sit through any more of "bless her heart, she'll get her reward in heaven'' cliches from the satanic hockey mom on the three major networks tonight.

2 comments:

March2theSea said...

i had this happen to me back in july. I had a web hosting site call me at work..and at first I thought it was a joke. Then I called the credit card and sure enough...

the semi good news was this was the only card they had as well as they kept it to about 500 bucks before I was notified. Still..it sucks 1,000 sucks..feeling so violated.

So far its just been that one card, got a new one and haven't even re-activated it yet..want it to be all cleared up w/said card before I start charging again.

Anonymous said...

We had this happen to us, but it was for $900 in nail products. Bob is not opening a salon, (at least not to my knowledge)....
On another note, I thought it was cute the way Sarah winked and giggled last night. That will go over well when she is in major dealings with all of our foreign friends. My friend called to say her suit was nice. My response: I love Joe's tie :)