Getting my new stolen credit card
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If you don't like novels, just skip to the last paragraph (yeah, the really short one).
So here's my WTF, which is a real gem. I recently read a post in the sidebar about some bank that blocks access to on-line transactions during the night which seemed pretty stupid. Everyone assumed it was because of a batch job, but only the gods know how the "system" works. Back to my story, which ended a few minutes ago...
Everything started in 2006 when I requested a credit card from my bank and I got one. I felt like a real man, because it was my first credit card, which even had a very small credit limit so it made me feel safe, because I know I'm a big spender. I could access my bank account 24/7 and I didn't need to carry money around with me, which made me feel a bit safer. If someone happened to steal my credit card, they couldn't do shit with it if they didn't have the PIN, except use it at a few gas stations which had security cameras and which would pay you back for ilegal transactions.
I'm a developer and my head constantly revolves around the software I write, even when I cook or I take walks in the park... and that's how I lost my credit card in may 2007, while talking a walk through the park. I may be sloppy with a lot of things, but I'm always careful when it comes to my personal finance. I spend the money I have, but I try to spend it well. They cancelled it and I applied for a new card which had your name printed in a silvery relief... It was just like the ones I've seen in movies. It looked so cool! A few months later, BOOM! I get a call from the bank, telling me they renewed my credit card and that was the first WTF. So, the bank decided that my lost credit card expired and I should get a new one. Ok, I this was free and I only had to pay about $5/year for it, so I decided I should go to the bank to pick it up and give it to my girlfriend. No, this wasn't the second WTF, because she's a careful spender. Yes, there are actual women with vaginas that don't like shopping. So, in november 2007, they renewed my lost credit card.
In may 2008, the same credit card got stolen. Again, I was careless and someone stole it from my pocket. I notice when I get to work and my colleagues tell me to call the bank again, which is what I do. I call the bank and tell them that someone stole my credit card and I want it cancelled. Again, they identify me by my personal details and my password (which is something like "W$%xQ9" and takes them forever to validate) and they cancel the credit card and tell me that if I ever find it, I should take it to the bank. Of course, they don't do anythign in particular there, except simply cut them in half. So, in may 2008, I lost my renewed lost credit card.
Last month, in november 2008, I get a call from the bank, telling me they renewed my credit card. Again, I went "WTF?" and didn't bother about it, because I was very busy at that time. A few days later, I check the credit card I had (remember the one with the name written in silver?) and it clearly said it was due in July next year.This was the second WTF, they renewed my cancelled credit card. This time, I had to go to the bank where I did my last personal transaction, which was quite far, so I asked a bank that was very close to my office to get it. A few days later, they called me and told me to go and pick it up, so I did. Surprise! No PIN number. I thought someone might have forgotten to mail the PIN, but when I asked about that, I got the third WTF: it's the old credit card, so it's got the same PIN; it's just a new piece of plastic but otherwise it's the old card which, as I remember, was declared stolen. I spent a while to understand this and it really didn't make sense...
A few days later, I went to an ATM, to check my account balance. I put the card in, it asks me for my preferred language, I choose "english" (because I've never figured out to which button my mother tongue corresponds to), it asks for my PIN, I type it in, it asks me what operation I'd like to perform, I choose "balance inquiry," it asks if I want a receipt, I choose "no" and it starts printing a receipt. WTF? The screen goes blank so I check the receipt: "This card has been retained in the ATM. Please contact your bank." I looked around and listened carefully... no police sirens... cool, I could still go back to work this afternoon! Since the ATM was inside a bank, I chose to go in and ask about what the fuck was going on. I went in and waited a few minutes, while I told the story to the security guard, as he unlocked the ATM and gave me back my card. Finally, I was going to find out what the story behind this piece of plastic was! It was my turn to ask the teller about my credit card, I couldn't believe it... So I told the teller about it and she said "here you go" and handed me a phone. WTF? I asked her what this was about and she told me "they'll fix it." WTF? I put that dirty piece fo plastic near my ear and heard another phone ringing at the other end. Someone finally picked up: it was the bank's customer support line (something which I would have normally called myself, but lately they began moving very slow and you have to be prepared to prove your identity with all kinds of questions they could ask about you, like "when was your last transaction?"; I went "how the fuck should I know?"; the woman at the other end said "well, you should know"; I replied "it was a month ago, how the fuck should I know? i don't write these things down"; she finally accepted that it was me, even if I was using a teller's phone to call and she admitted that "last month" was precise enough - WTF). When I told my story to the woman from customer support, I realized I was doomed. She explained to me that they fully renewed my credit card but it was the same credit card, they just changed the plastic. When they "renewed" the card, a few months after I cancelled it because it got stolen, they didn't change the status, so the new plastic I got was the old card, which - you guessed it - was still stolen. WTF? Apparently, they cancelled the plastic instead of the credit card - since they renewed it - but somehow they actually cancelled my credit card, because the new plastic was also useless being tied to the old credit card. I felt naked as I couldn't find any logic in any of this.
Technically, the bank renewed my credit card without renewing it and sent me a new, stolen piece of useless plastic.
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@rohypnol said:
Yes, there are actual women with vaginas that don't like shopping.
I call bullshit. Certain anatomy operations non-withstanding.
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@rohypnol said:
I'm always careful when it comes to my personal finance.
Really? By my account you had your card either lost or stolen through negligence on THREE separate occasions. (It might be more, I got a bit lost in the middle). Not only that but couldn't answer a simple question like 'what was your last transaction?'. I'm not anal about keeping tabs on my finances but I could tell you my last transaction and the total (or close enough for the bank to believe me) and every regular outgoing from my account (I'm talking direct debits here). I realise banks shouldn't make mistakes but it really is your onus to at least keep a eye on things.
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@Flatline said:
@rohypnol said:
I'm always careful when it comes to my personal finance.
Really? By my account you had your card either lost or stolen through negligence on THREE separate occasions. (It might be more, I got a bit lost in the middle). Not only that but couldn't answer a simple question like 'what was your last transaction?'. I'm not anal about keeping tabs on my finances but I could tell you my last transaction and the total (or close enough for the bank to believe me) and every regular outgoing from my account (I'm talking direct debits here). I realise banks shouldn't make mistakes but it really is your onus to at least keep a eye on things.
I know the totals, my last transaction was about a month ago and nobody could do much with that credit card, because now I use it exactly for this - I transfer smal ammounts of money from my regular account into the one I access with this card and I always keep this card with me. If someone finds it, there's not much they can do with it and even if they manage to use it, they still can get only a smal amount of money. This way, I can think about other things while carrying my CC with me and not watching over it like my whole life was on that piece of plastic. There's a $100 limit on it. In the worst case possible, I lose $100 - which stil never happened. Would you like to know my shoe size now?
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@valerion said:
@rohypnol said:
Yes, there are actual women with vaginas that don't like shopping.
I call bullshit. Certain anatomy operations non-withstanding.
I'd nominate my wife. Certain factors* make it difficult for her to decide on anything, so usually she doesn't bother shopping.
She does, however, like sending me out to do it.
*OCD, and people keep bandying about "high-functioning Asperger's"
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I've read several accounts on the internet of this happening to people. Apparently if your credit card is lost or stolen you need to tell the bank to CLOSE THE ACCOUNT, not just cancel the card. The two are apparently different entities to the banks, which makes no sense to me. But since I'm an overly logical thinker, what with being a software engineer and all, I frequently have the habit of clouding issues with facts. But anyway, yeah, always tell them to close the ACCOUNT, not just the card.
BTW, while I agree that the OP should have had some better memory of his last transaction, in general I think the credit company's user authorization routines are screwed up. Several years ago I tried to order my free yearly credit reports. First I had to prove who I was. They do that online by pulling several transactions from your report and quizzing you on them. In this case, I'd recently opened an account with Exxon/Mobile to have a gas card. What do you think the first quiz question was? It was "which company did you open an account with recently?" The possible answers were:
A. Exxon
B. Mobile
C. Chartreuse-don't-remember-but-obviously-not-this-companyI went so far as to read the gas card, front and back and all the branding/logos everywhere clearly identified the company as "Exxon/Mobile". Brillant!
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@Benanov said:
@valerion said:
@rohypnol said:
Yes, there are actual women with vaginas that don't like shopping.
I call bullshit. Certain anatomy operations non-withstanding.
I'd nominate my wife. Certain factors* make it difficult for her to decide on anything, so usually she doesn't bother shopping.
She does, however, like sending me out to do it.
*OCD, and people keep bandying about "high-functioning Asperger's"
And you're really really sure about the whole anatomy operations thing?
(Joke, joke, please don't take offense, I'm not actually insulting your wife. I'm sure she's lovely).
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@Benanov said:
Hearing this, I wonder if a communicable version of whatever it is your wife has could be developed. This si this kind of thing that bio-science could do to benefit all of society. Maybe make a cure for the developed disease and make it weaponizable.. that way we could destroy the lives/economies of our enemies, once they adapt to not having such a huge burden on individual families....@valerion said:
@rohypnol said:
Yes, there are actual women with vaginas that don't like shopping.
I call bullshit. Certain anatomy operations non-withstanding.
I'd nominate my wife. Certain factors* make it difficult for her to decide on anything, so usually she doesn't bother shopping.
She does, however, like sending me out to do it.
*OCD, and people keep bandying about "high-functioning Asperger's"
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@valerion said:
@Benanov said:
(sigh)I'd nominate my wife. Certain factors* make it difficult for her to decide on anything, so usually she doesn't bother shopping.
And you're really really sure about the whole anatomy operations thing?
She does, however, like sending me out to do it.
*OCD, and people keep bandying about "high-functioning Asperger's"
(Joke, joke, please don't take offense, I'm not actually insulting your wife. I'm sure she's lovely).Asperger's Syndrome is a form of autism where an otherwise intelligent, high-functioning individual doesn't natively know about social cues and comportment, and has to spend a lot, relatively speaking, of mental processing power on things most people take for granted, such as prosody, facial expression, gesticulation, and in some cases knowledge division. In moderate to severe cases, they may appear mentally retarded in person because they spend their quick-thinking skill on trying to read the other person's responses rather than picking their own words or focusing on their own expression/tone. A common result of this is spending a lot of time with people younger than oneself, or online (where cues are made much more clear with smileys and sarcasm tags, which are much easier to look for than the shape of someone's face), especially in communities where they aren't at any disadvantage (such as 4chan's "equal disrespect for all" system, or technical fora's dispassionate, technical nature, or TDWTF's combination of the two). Over time, people with AS can learn to be just as socially ept as everyone else, although it is extremely hard work for them almost each and every time.
(I know I'm going to get hatemail for the next paragraph.)
When women shop alone, they do so to gain what they perceive as social prestige. They typically ignore things that actually result in social prestige because such things come unconsciously to them, but instead focus on trivialities and irrelevancies and associate a pathologically high importance to them. When women shop as a group, it's a social experience, providing topics for discussion, feelings of both unity and individuality, and, again, "social prestige". Aspies actually have to spend effort to be sociable in order to both interpret the emotions of others and express their own emotions, which means they learn consciously what matters and what doesn't. They then apply
I was going to write up a detailed explanation and rant about Aspergers Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to flame Valerion, but a little under halfway through I lost interest and gave up. Instead, I'm dedicating this post to polluting the tag cloud. If you're interested in reading my rant, you can find it in the
HTML commentshopefully invisible div. God I hate Community Server.
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@TwelveBaud said:
I was going to write up a detailed explanation and rant about Aspergers Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to flame Valerion, but a little under halfway through I lost interest and gave up.
Sounds like you have ADHD.
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$diety damn that was a long rant...
I got bored and dozed off halfway through. I didn't even know that you could do cool things with these damn forumns!!!
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@morbiuswilters said:
Sounds like you have ADHD.
Nah, just commitment anxiety. Once I hit the post button, everything's up there for the world to see, and judge me on, both for my words and for my thoughts. That's why, when it comes to English papers, I never finish anyth
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Where did you try to get your free credit report that they asked you to provide transactions?
The only legitimate and truly free source for a free credit report is annualcreditreport.com. The others all require that you sign up for some service that actually costs money. Annualcreditreport.com provides reports from all three credit reporting agencies absolutely free. Scores are extra, though.
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@rohypnol said:
I know the totals, my last transaction was about a month ago and nobody could do much with that credit card, because now I use it exactly for this - I transfer smal ammounts of money from my regular account into the one I access with this card and I always keep this card with me. If someone finds it, there's not much they can do with it and even if they manage to use it, they still can get only a smal amount of money. This way, I can think about other things while carrying my CC with me and not watching over it like my whole life was on that piece of plastic. There's a $100 limit on it. In the worst case possible, I lose $100 - which stil never happened. Would you like to know my shoe size now?
Wait... so it's a credit card, but you have to transfer money to the account in order to use it? Wouldn't that make it a debit card?
Also, I fail to see the point of having a card with a $100 limit. Surely there must be times when you need to spend more than that, especially in emergency situations. If you really want to limit your spending, leave the card at home and carry cash.
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Actually, $100 should be enough for almost everything I need. I usually keep this account balanced to zero. If I need to buy something online, I transfer the money I need to it and use it. The credit is in case I need a little extra or if I'm not in a place where I can transfer money to it. It's really simple, but having to write it down in a language that's not even native to me makes it seem complicated and useless, but it's a very simple thing I use to make sure I have some money with me, I have a bit of credit and if anyone screws me over, they can't get much. BTW, "hey, let's go get somethign to eat! / damn, i don't have any money" and "i really need $20 until tomorrow, can you help?" and "i'm sick, can you come visit me?" also count as emergencies. The credit is in case I need a bit of extra money until pay day, like if I see something really cool and there's a chance somene else will get it until I get paid.
My shoe size is 42 (dunno what the equivalent for that in other countries is).
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please may i have 7 mins of my life back
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@AMerrickanGirl said:
They ask some verification questions, to veryfy you're not trying to pull someone else's report. But TransUnion is (was) famous for asking so much obscure questions, that IIRC got sued for that. You 've got like a minute or so to answer that, and when you find the info, it's too late. And you lose your yearly chance, SOL.Where did you try to get your free credit report that they asked you to provide transactions?
The only legitimate and truly free source for a free credit report is annualcreditreport.com. The others all require that you sign up for some service that actually costs money. Annualcreditreport.com provides reports from all three credit reporting agencies absolutely free. Scores are extra, though.
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@jetcitywoman said:
I've read several accounts on the internet of this happening to people. Apparently if your credit card is lost or stolen you need to tell the bank to CLOSE THE ACCOUNT, not just cancel the card. The two are apparently different entities to the banks, which makes no sense to me.
Hm, in my experience, that applies to Debit Cards. CC's are one thing and the same. For me, reporting a stolen CC is as easy as calling and reporting it stolen, or doing the same thing on the online banking system. New plastic is then generated, and it uses a different credit card number.The thing with debit cards is that the savings account is always the same, but the bankcard the bank gives you is from either VISA or MasterCard. This entity separation enables you to cancel your bankcard, but get issued a new bankcard with a different number linked to the same savings acct.
However, I do know a bank that uses the actual bankcard number as the savings account number for "cheap" accounts. That's a big WTF but that's another story.
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@jetcitywoman said:
IApparently if your credit card is lost or stolen you need to tell the bank to CLOSE THE ACCOUNT, not just cancel the card.
You definitely do not want to close the entire account, or your credit score will take a hit. I (stupidly) lost my wallet last month and had to report 6 credit cards as lost/stolen. The result for all cards was that a new number was created and my existing account history/balance was transfered to that new account number. The new card had this new number on it. My credit score was unaffected. For the most part, this was a pretty hassle free process. The only exception was the mouth-breathing idiots at First National Bank of Omaha who wanted to charge me $10 for a replacement. I screamed bloody murder over that one (because charging for replacement cards is not a standard practice and is completely unacceptable to me). I got it refunded. All in all, the only monetary loss was the $12 I had to pay to get a replacement drivers license. Luckily, I had no cash in the wallet at the time...could have been worse.
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@danixdefcon5 said:
@jetcitywoman said:
I've read several accounts on the internet of this happening to people. Apparently if your credit card is lost or stolen you need to tell the bank to CLOSE THE ACCOUNT, not just cancel the card. The two are apparently different entities to the banks, which makes no sense to me.
Hm, in my experience, that applies to Debit Cards. CC's are one thing and the same. For me, reporting a stolen CC is as easy as calling and reporting it stolen, or doing the same thing on the online banking system. New plastic is then generated, and it uses a different credit card number.The thing with debit cards is that the savings account is always the same, but the bankcard the bank gives you is from either VISA or MasterCard. This entity separation enables you to cancel your bankcard, but get issued a new bankcard with a different number linked to the same savings acct.
However, I do know a bank that uses the actual bankcard number as the savings account number for "cheap" accounts. That's a big WTF but that's another story.
Right. I've had to report a couple of credit / debit cards as lost and for both the process was the same: a new card with a new number mailed to me in about 3 days with nothing about my "backend" accounts changing.
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@TwelveBaud said:
I'd love it if you could explain this theory of shopping as social prestige, because it sounds like you have a misunderstanding of the fundamental reason why so many women go shopping so much and do it in the way they do.@valerion said:
@Benanov said:
(sigh)I'd nominate my wife. Certain factors* make it difficult for her to decide on anything, so usually she doesn't bother shopping.
And you're really really sure about the whole anatomy operations thing?
She does, however, like sending me out to do it.
*OCD, and people keep bandying about "high-functioning Asperger's"
(Joke, joke, please don't take offense, I'm not actually insulting your wife. I'm sure she's lovely).Asperger's Syndrome is a form of autism where an otherwise intelligent, high-functioning individual doesn't natively know about social cues and comportment, and has to spend a lot, relatively speaking, of mental processing power on things most people take for granted, such as prosody, facial expression, gesticulation, and in some cases knowledge division. In moderate to severe cases, they may appear mentally retarded in person because they spend their quick-thinking skill on trying to read the other person's responses rather than picking their own words or focusing on their own expression/tone. A common result of this is spending a lot of time with people younger than oneself, or online (where cues are made much more clear with smileys and sarcasm tags, which are much easier to look for than the shape of someone's face), especially in communities where they aren't at any disadvantage (such as 4chan's "equal disrespect for all" system, or technical fora's dispassionate, technical nature, or TDWTF's combination of the two). Over time, people with AS can learn to be just as socially ept as everyone else, although it is extremely hard work for them almost each and every time.
(I know I'm going to get hatemail for the next paragraph.)
When women shop alone, they do so to gain what they perceive as social prestige. They typically ignore things that actually result in social prestige because such things come unconsciously to them, but instead focus on trivialities and irrelevancies and associate a pathologically high importance to them. When women shop as a group, it's a social experience, providing topics for discussion, feelings of both unity and individuality, and, again, "social prestige". Aspies actually have to spend effort to be sociable in order to both interpret the emotions of others and express their own emotions, which means they learn consciously what matters and what doesn't. They then apply
I was going to write up a detailed explanation and rant about Aspergers Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to flame Valerion, but a little under halfway through I lost interest and gave up. Instead, I'm dedicating this post to polluting the tag cloud. If you're interested in reading my rant, you can find it in the
HTML commentshopefully invisible div. God I hate Community Server.
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@AMerrickanGirl said:
The only legitimate and truly free source for a free credit report is annualcreditreport.com. The others all require that you sign up for some service that actually costs money. Annualcreditreport.com provides reports from all three credit reporting agencies absolutely free. Scores are extra, though.
Transunion, equifax, and experian are required, due to their status of the big three credit unions, to offer a free annual credit report. You can get one from each of them each year, for a total of three free reports a year. Of course, they are required to require validation, and I'm not aware of any standards they need to follow to limit that validation to reasonable mechanisms.
I have seen a few third party places which will request your free credit reports on your behalf, asking you enough personal information that they can do this, and then make their money by snagging a copy of your report for themselves and anyone who wants to pay them for it. I'd avoid using such businesses, personally. I am not personally familiar with annualcreditreport.com, but that sounds like they may be using that same MO.
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@jetcitywoman said:
I've read several accounts on the internet of this happening to people. Apparently if your credit card is lost or stolen you need to tell the bank to CLOSE THE ACCOUNT, not just cancel the card.
I've sort of run into this myself. When I called in my first lost credit card, the operator asked if I wanted to get my new card shipped out via overnight delivery, or if regular shipping would work. I asked if it would have a new card number, and was told, "No, not unless you specifically requested it." I told them to close the account. After a fun little conversation in which I managed to convey, finally, that I really meant, "close the account, I'm no longer going to do business with you," I got to talk to her manager, and explain exactly how badly I thought their policies sucked; then I got to talk to someone in their account closures department and tell them the same thing.
My next lost credit card call went much nicer. I called Discover, and they said, "Oh, ok, we'll close that account, transfer the balance to a new account. How would you like us to ship out the new card?" I'd be really surprised if they managed to learn what a reasonable customer I am (and yes, I think it's completely unreasonable for a customer to accept getting the same card - especially on receiving it and seeing it had the same card number), as the calls were back to back; I'd had my wallet stolen.
Personally, I think it's easy enough to get a credit card, once you have established credit. As such, it's the proper thing to send a message to credit card companies that the behavior won't be tolerated. Even if one just bounces from one company that does the practice to another, if enough people do it, they'll change their practices, to retain customers.
P.S. As far as I can tell, there's no credit hit, so long as you *immediately* send in a payment for any balance you have with them. Admittedly, I don't know this for certain, because while I was calling the credit card companies, my wife was in the other room, going through their online banking sites, to electronically send a payment - so I was able to answer the question of, "When did you make your last payment" very easily ("about 30 seconds ago" - Discover didn't ask that question, or it would've been longer; dealing with the first company took a while.)
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@rohypnol said:
A few months later, BOOM! I get a call from the bank, telling me they renewed my credit card and that was the first WTF. So, the bank decided that my lost credit card expired and I should get a new one. Ok, I this was free and I only had to pay about $5/year for it, so I decided I should go to the bank to pick it up and give it to my girlfriend.
And TRWTF: you didn't notice that the credit card number was suspiciously close to the old number, and cancel the account. WTF didn't you report this to thedailywtf back in november 2007?
Admittedly, I have a bit of a memory for numbers. Years ago, a friend of mine had lost his credit card, and reported it stolen. The next time we went out to lunch together, I happened to glance at his credit card receipt, and noticed that the last four digits were the same as his old card. I commented how that was very surprising. He did a double-take, and saw that his card number was, in fact, the same. (This was the experience that made me careful for my own incident, reported just above.)
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@tgape said:
And TRWTF: you didn't notice that the credit card number was suspiciously close to the old number, and cancel the account. WTF didn't you report this to thedailywtf back in november 2007?
Because I don't know my CC number. I know my bank account number, my PINs, almost all the personal numbers (such as the equivalent of your SSN) but I rarely used the CC# to remember it.
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@rohypnol said:
I remember the last four digits of my CC's. Also, I have a list with the last four CC digits on a notepad, as at least one of my online banking systems requires this to do CC payments. Another reason is an incident I had way back in August 2005 when I wanted to cancel my (lost, presumably stolen) debit card and ran into a WTFy employee on the other side of the line that couldn't tell which cards were active and which were not, and insisted on me giving him my lost card's number. (Note: I only had two active cards, the other ones they saw were either expired or destroyed; and I already had given the employee the other card's number. It was simply a matter of checking which was the remaining active card.)@tgape said:
And TRWTF: you didn't notice that the credit card number was suspiciously close to the old number, and cancel the account. WTF didn't you report this to thedailywtf back in november 2007?
Because I don't know my CC number. I know my bank account number, my PINs, almost all the personal numbers (such as the equivalent of your SSN) but I rarely used the CC# to remember it.
