Dradt - My credit card has been pwned

Well, it was caught early by the CC company. Amazing how quickly they zeroed the account on the basis of two, out of the ordinary, for me, charges.

Both charges were denied as suspect even before I was contacted.

No damage to me, except waiting for the new card to arrive.

Funny, that just happened to me on Saturday. The fraud department called me up to see if charged $2700 at 7am Friday morning. What tipped them off is that the expiration date was wrong.

My wife got hers actually nicked in Spain, last year, we had all her cards stopped by CC Sentinel within half an hour The only charges they ran up and didn't stop were tolls on motorways and tickets on the Barcelona underground: The ticket machines don't require a pin, nor, obviously, a signature or any other identification. They just refuse them and the ticket vendor pays the cost.

Had my pwned a few years back too. No explanation or idea of how it could happened. Someone just started ordering digital cameras to a Florida address one day (I have never lived in FL). Makes you wonder how secure your money really is these days.

Interesting, when mine got pwnd, one of the charges was from Florida as well. Wonder if there's a connection?

Here's my guess as to how it happened: I frequently give my credit card to restaurant employees without a second thought. I trust them to use it to just pay for my meal, and not steal its data and offer it up for sale on an IRC channel. Clearly this trust is misplaced.

Another possibility is that some credit card receipt printers won't "X" out the full credit card number, and someone dumpster-dived. Another possibility is that someone got the number from an old-style carbon receipt (once in a blue moon I make purchases that involve those kinds of receipts).

In any case, the convenience of being able to pay via those methods, combined with the swift and painless way that the banks will correct these kinds of things, makes it worth it for me to continue my purchasing habits unchanged, even though I know I'm gonna get pwnd again.

Quote:
Here's my guess as to how it happened: I frequently give my credit card to restaurant employees without a second thought. I trust them to use it to just pay for my meal, and not steal its data and offer it up for sale on an IRC channel. Clearly this trust is misplaced.

And your solution? I've heard of people walking with their servers to watch them ring up their bill. I think that's ridiculous.

Besides, if any proper investigation were made into your charges, they could probably tell when the illegal activity started, and track down which restaurant and server it was. Heck, I wonder if the CC companies are smart enough to single out a particular store if their customers seem to have their numbers stolen after shopping there.

I've had my number stolen a couple times. The last time I seemed to get someone who was new to the idea. They signed up for an online dating service, and ordered some beauty supplies and children's reading material, but they had the products shipped to the billing address. I don't know why you'd even bother going through with the purchases. It seems like a big waste of time for the theif.