Hopefully Doug Burnside will hop in here and describe his experiences in this area (I believe the same thing happened to him once).

Twice, actually.

Both times the CC information was compromised when I sent it via non-encrypted email to businesses from which I made purchases. People hacked their email servers to get the information.

The first time was a real criminal genius who used the credit card numbers to make long distance phone calls -- didn't take the police too long to track him down.

The second time the perpetrator didn't have quite enough information: He had my first initial but not the full name, so he attempted to make about $30,000 worth of purchases in two days as David, Darin, Donald, etc. and none of the purchases went through. The bank caught on pretty quick and cancelled the card.

I no longer send my credit card number through emails, but have no problems sending it to encrypted sites. If encryption is not available, then I make them give me a phone number and give them the numbers that way. If they won't do that, then I shop elsewhere.

tanstaafl.