Kevin Brown wrote:  "Another way to protect yourself
is to only use certain cards in certain ways.  E.g.
one card for online purchases, another for brick and
mortar stores."

I've heard the majority of credit card fraud is
NOT on via the Web. 

We've been lucky so far.  We use a debit card for
almost everything.  Once my wife's purse was rifled
when she left it in a church (where the next group
meeting was Debtors Anonymous, I guess someone was
too far in debt to resist....).  By 3 p.m. we had
a call from Visa saying they had some transactions
that were out of profile ... someone rolled two
$300 purchases close together at Wal-Mart, on our
debit card.  They did not hit our account for that.
Our credit cards, for some reason, were untouched.

By that evening we had a call from a liquor store
about 20 minutes away, and we had her driver's
license back, along with the canceled debit card.

The banks have some really good systems in place
for detecting fraudulent purchases, especially good
for people like us with rather limited orbits.
So a lot of these numbers that have gotten out
are going to get frozen on the first attempt to
use them.

OBLIGATORY COMPUTER CONNECTION:  The companies
that do stupid things with your credit data and
get it leaked are VERY liable.  Be advised, if
you are DOING any credit card processing, to
move all credit data away from the Net as
directly as possible, on a one-way path!
If you keep it where the Web server can see it,
shame on you.  One company I worked for sent
the numbers to a CC clearance site, got back
an auth number, and kept only the last 4 on
their own computer.

BTW, OT:  someone else opened a J.C.Penneys'
account in our names and then immediately had the
address changed to a mailboxes joint across town,
collected their new card, and rung up some $4000
at Penney's.  It might have been Imelda -- there
were a lot of shoes.  For that, Penneys took the
fall, which they deserved for allowing the billing
address to be a rented mailbox, and then allowing
$4000 purchases!

More OT:  Since all that happened, we have bought
two new cars, and the dealerships have said our
credit is faultless.  So we have NOT been blamed
for some rather costly errors on the banks' part.
(We pay off most credit card balances immediately --
I understand the CC companies call folks like us
"deadbeats".)



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