Goddamned card number stolen

Wife’s debit card number (visa) got stolen. Fraud case with provider initiated.

Anything else we should be on the lookout for, other than an urgent need to deconstuct the capitalist state?

That should be about it. The card should be cancelled, a replacement should be on its way to you, and the case you filed should take care of whatever charges were made as long as you field any applicable follow-up contact from the provider and the transactions weren’t things she would normally conduct.

About the only other thing I would suggest is minimizing debit card usage to ATMs and any instance at a merchant where you need cash back, since it’s an order of magnitude easier to file a fraud claim on a credit card than a debit card. I got to learn that one the hard way back when PSN got hacked.

Yep, never use debit cards like credit cards. You’re actually still protected, but it can take a couple of months to get your money back as it’s actually withdrawn from your account.

Someone cloned my credit card recently and made a few iTunes purchases and one mega $200 purchase in some strange city. Fortunately, the iTunes purchases alerted me and I called the bank to cancel. Since then, I reduce the amount of website I will trust with my credit card - if they have Paypal, I will use Paypal as the choice of payment.

The same thing happened to us a few weeks back. Someone booked a flight, rented a car and did some other stuff. The bank blocked the card and notified us before we had even noticed ourselves (very fast response of the bank, literally within hours). and we got all the money back without a fuss. They said there was literally nothing we would have been able to do to prevent this… :-(

I didn’t know this. Thanks… what a pain in the ass.

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Seems like good advice.

I realized recently that I have not used my debit card for any purpose for over a year. I can’t remember the last time I needed or used cash.

Good advice in here. Follow it!

I only ever use my credit card. Last week I tried to withdraw cash from my bank and as it turns out I haven’t used it in so long that I’ve forgotten my PIN number!

Hmm, I don’t carry any cash. I use my debit card for virtually every single in-person purchase I make. Only use a credit card online.

Don’t do that. Buy stuff with your credit card. Debit should only be used at ATMs, ever.

Beyond safety issues, using credit cards also builds your credit score, useful if you need a loan for any reason (car, mortgage, etc) and you can save a ton of money with good credit and the right credit card. I have the chase sapphire reserve, which gets me 3 points per dollar spent on travel and dining, and those points can either be transferred to many airlines’ frequent flier programs or spent directly on travel at a 50% bonus. So in reality, I’m getting a whopping 4.5% cash back minimum.

That card doesn’t cover Amazon, so I have an Amazon Prime card also, which gets 5% cash back on everything purchased there.

These little percentages don’t seem like much but when the discounts apply to the vast majority of your purchases over the time window of your entire life, they really add up. I get a ~5% discount on pretty much everything but my mortgage.

This is what the millenials call “high level adulting”.

I carry cash instead of using the debit card. I understand you can probably get your money back with a debit card but the protection is certainly not as good or easy as credit cards. Which I have now had stolen 3 times over 20 years, probably all online vendors from mom & pop to Target. Each time it was easy to fix and they all fedex’d the replacement card to me. The only pain point is all the online billing/subscriptions that have to be reset.

Pretty rare that I use the cash though these days, maybe once a month, it’s almost all credit card.

Not like you can use the debit card at spots that don’t accept credit cards anyway.

There are some exceptions to this, all small local businesses I found. Thinking about it they are all Vietnamese/Chinese owned bakeries/donut shops. They will take debit cards & cash but not credit cards unless it’s over $5-$20 depending on the location. I imagine those fees would kill their profits.

I’ve never even heard of that-- I think it’s actually against the credit card terms of service to do that.

Not anymore. We have that here too, lower price for debit vs credit as well. We had a grocery chain that only took debit, no credit for years.

Yeah, you see that around here as well. Not super common, but it’s around.

And just to clarify, I think the debit only was always allowed and the varying price is because Visa and Mastercard lost their court case. Retailers are a lot more free to charge as they wish since that case.

Um, well, my credit cards are what I’m trying to pay down; i sure as hell don’t need more on them, and there’s no way I would be disciplined enough to pay off what I charged each month (not until I get the balances down to zero at least, then it seems like a good call).

You’re better off using cash than using a debit card at every place you purchase. With cash at least the most you can lose is the cash. With the debit card, you will get your money back, but they have longer to deal with it and you could miss payments or bounce checks while they get to it.

Checks… nothing something I ever use either.