I get a text every time one of our cards are used. My wife and kids are in Mexico on vacation and I informed the CC company of the dates the card would be there. I still got calls from my bank to authorize her purchases of souvenirs, just takes a few minutes and well worth the time to prevent fraudulent charges.
If you and your spouse have cards from the same bank, have them issue cards with different numbers on them. That way if the two of you are on vacation, only the compromised card has to be killed. That leaves y'all with a working card till the new one arrives. With our bank, I can turn a card on and off from my phone so if I seen a charge that isn't ours, I can instantly block that card till I can contact the bank.
The times our cards have been hit were always after we paid for food in a sit-down restaurant where the card left our sight. I walk to the bar to pay now or carry enough cash to pay at the table and have been lucky for the last few years since I started doing this.

always have a back up card

make a list of everyone who auto charges your card RE: tollway, lawn service, Newspaper, storage units, etc.

Yep, sit-down restaurants are the worst as far as CC numbers getting lifted. I was able to press charges once against one waitress. Last I heard, charge was getting combined with others, then I never heard another word. She was obviously a life-long scammer.

As far as SSNs getting boosted, both times we've experienced it was immediately after one of us had been to a government office, one state, one federal.

That’s ID theft buzz

So, this guy's "hack" has been turned over to fraud investigators. They will go to G2 Powersports where the purchase was made and try to see who made the purchase? Hope they have some record with the perps personal info. Probably just made the sale and was happy

Remember when they put the chips in cards to cut down on fraud!??!

I was just thinking same thing lol!!

I have all set up to text or email every usage.

I think the "fraud" portion stems from where you use your card. Use a sketchy retailer or app then get sketchy results. Just my opinion.

I’ve been hit twice on my debit card. One looked like charges to att I would never have questioned it but they were greedy and had several charges. Bank refunded our money.

I call our card carriers before any vacation and let them know the dates and destination. That can keep you from getting a fraud prevention decline while traveling.

I rode to see my daughter and her family in Lafayette, Louisiana and stopped at the ATM to get some cash and it rejected my card. I parked and walked in to see an officer to see what was going on. He asked if I was at a club in upstate New York the night before and charged a couple of things. And at 2am asking if I ordered $1700 worth of car accessories from overseas. He laughed while he asked, so I saw no reason to answer. Then he said that he knew the address the parts were being sent to. I casually asked what the address was and I began writing it down and he stopped talking when he saw me writing.
He said that they wouldn’t do anything about it but canceled my old cc. And this was about 20 years ago

Unfortunately, there is very little done to crack down on credit card fraud. Sure, occasionally a handful of people get prosecuted, but for the most part it is just written off by the credit card companies. A year or two ago, I was hired by an out of state company that had suffered several million in losses to credit card fraud to investigate some of the largest incidents. All they knew for sure was that a lot of the equipment that they sold (unknowingly by use of stolen credit card info) had been repeatedly delivered to the same city and on several occasions to the same several addresses. After a couple months of investigating and a ton of surveillance, I knew exactly who all of the players were, their complete backgrounds, where they lived, who their associates were, where they were reselling the equipment, etc. To say the least, it was a gang related huge stolen credit card ring that was racking up hundreds of thousands per month. Without getting into methods, I instantly knew the next time they made several purchases totaling right at $700,000 using stolen card info. All of the equipment was to be delivered to the same address on the same day at the same time. The irony was that the delivery was to be made withing eyesight of the headquarters of the police department of this large city. I worked up all of the case information, with complete files on all of the players and included all of the evidence of the previous millions in fraudulent cases by these same thugs. I took all of this information and handed it on a silver platter to a couple of detectives with the police department in this major city. I told them that day after tomorrow at 3:00pm - all of the members of this ring will be right there (I had them look out of their window and showed them the place of delivery) receiving 3/4 of a million dollars worth of fraudulent purchases. Their response? Thanks, but we are not interested. We then talked in circles about whether my client (the equipment company) or the credit card company or the people whose card numbers were used were the actual victims. Additional quick work yielded affidavits from my client and the cardholders that they wanted to pursue charges, but the credit card company's "fraud division" said that they weren't interested in pursuing any charges. So despite being provided all of the info on the crime ring and knowing that another large value crime was about to be committed across the street from the police headquarters....the police declined to get involved and just let it go ahead and happen.

I had a card that I had never used, not once, After 2 years I called to cancel, they asked "for what reason". I stated that I never used it , did not need it.
They asked If I had bought $750.00 worth of computer parts in California, two weeks back. I had not . I told them the only way those numbers were used was an
inside job. They cancelled the card and I never was billed.

Mo

Let me get this straight, you tried to get cash from an ATM and a cop was already inside waiting for you and knew all of the details about your card transactions?

^^^^ I think he's referring to a bank officer.

We've had fraudulent charges a time or two, but usually relatively small. My understanding was the crooks would use the card to make a small purchase or two to assure the card worked before going in heavy. The good news is when these have happened, to my knowledge, we've been contacted by the card company pretty quickly.

Funny story though, about 10 or 12 years ago I was in Detroit on business, and instead of staying in that crap hole, I decided to pop across the river and stay in Windsor, ONT where the casinos are better. I didn't tell anyone as it did not occur to me until the last minute to stay over on the Canadian side. I immediately hit the casinos and was having a pretty good run when my wife called me in a panic. Said AMEX had called her to notify us of fraudulent activity taking place on my card...and it was all happening in Canada!! I had to let her know that, no, it was me and I had left the US without her knowledge We laughed it off, but I had to call AMEX and answer a bunch of questions to assure the card didn't get frozen.

This story sounds completely made up

My Canada story? Nope, all true...wife still tells the story on occasion. And to make it even more made up sounding, that night was the Canadian National Championship of the Rockstar computer game, so there were all these people walking around the casino dressed as their selected metal band - I think the Blue Oyster Cult cover of Don't Fear the Reaper ultimately won. Fun times!

No, the OP's...Buzz's original post

His original post sounds made up

Im skeptical personally

Last year on the way to an afternoon fishing Joe Pool Lake, I stopped in at Chicken Express. Drive thru was busy so the guy came out and took my credit card in to run it. By the time I got home a few hours later there were charges on it for some crap. This cc was only used for auto-charges like the water bill and AT&T, never ever at an establishment until that day. POS caused me to have to reset all those accounts. Found out later many others were hit after using their cc there. Never again will my cc leave my sight. Before that, I was in Walmart one day but I paid cash for my items. A little later that day, my wife noticed some charges on our cc. Seems like someone got close enough to me to scan my card in my wallet. Wife bought some sleeves that prevent that afterwards and no problem since. Fing thieves!

Both, but when it happens to your debit card, it takes a while for the funds to be returned to your account, so it could be an issue for you if you get wiped out, have bills tied to that card, etc, leading to an overdraft. With a credit card, they shut it down and issue a new card in a few days, but you’re not out of your checking account funds, like if your debit card is stolen.

I’m not overly cautious with the cc. Never use the debit card. I’ve been hacked 1 time they charged $1.92 to see if it would work and then tried to buy something for $1,000+ but the cc company had already caught on called us and declined it. Was somewhere in Cali

I had someone get ahold of my debit card probably 10 years ago in California. They bought about $4k worth of a car stereo with it. Bank put it back in my account at midnight.

We were in California years ago when we were informed that a charge had been made on our card in London for about $1500. It was a bit of a hassle to get that card canceled and a new one sent to us. All our cards have alerts to us of expenditures above a certain level.