The Nightmare of Fraudulent Charges on my Credit Card

Last week, I got what looked like a Spam text saying my bank had noticed some “unusual activity” on my credit card.  My wife lives in the accounting world so I told her about the message.  She agreed it was probably Spam but checked …and found a charge to a company we’d never heard of.  

I thought at that point, you tell the credit card company you didn’t buy anything from that company and the charge goes away.  Not so fast radio boy.  The charge goes away but so does your ENTIRE CREDIT CARD account.  A new card has been issued but now, I have to re-enter that on everything.  Ebay, PayPal, Amazon, a half dozen airlines and more.  I just wanted the charge to go away.  But I guess if the credit card companies did that, they’d be on the hook for every charge you have second thoughts about.  

My identity was stolen years ago when I was buying some clothes for work.  They offered 40% off if I opened a store account.  For nearly half off, I couldn’t pass it up.  A month or so later, my wife contacted our credit card company to tell them we were moving.  The credit card company said, “Your husband already gave us your new address in Michigan”.  My wife said, “My husband barely knows where we bank.  And we’re moving to Virginia.  Not Michigan”.   I expected that to be a mess but it was pretty easy.  But NOW, when we finance anything, we have to UN-FREEZE our credit, let them run a report and re-freeze it, just to stay safe.  

I would like to punch the bad guys in the throat who hijack my account or charge things in my name but I guess this too shall pass in a few weeks.