Sketchy Tech Situation

There are a lot of things that are annoying about the world we live in today, and one of them is how seemingly vulnerable things can be.

My wife and I have a particular way to manage our finances, and that's mainly through the use of credit cards. We use the cards as a way to do all of our daily spending and then pay that bill off twice a month so that we don't get any interest charges, and our credit score stays pretty healthy. This has worked out very well. We are also VERY careful with what we do because we don't want our information stolen!

This makes it very easy to see what can go wrong in other situations though. We had a card that was really old and one that we never use, hell we didn't even ACTIVATE the thing. Because we are very careful and specific for what we do, it makes it thankfully straight forward to see when things go amiss. With how credit cards operate these days, it's not a good idea to cancel a card if it's old because then it decreases your "credit history" which is a load of fucking shit if you ask me but I digress.

I was in my normal habit of checking the cards, and suddenly I saw a charge on one of them that I had no idea what the hell it was. I thought that it was very strange, especially because it was NOT something one would normally see that's for sure. I did some investigating and even did a web search for the place to see what the heck it was, and sure enough I got a hit. This place was geographically FAR away from where we live, although it was still in the same country. There is no reason we would ever go there, and certainly wouldn't go there without both of us going so I was pissed. I called the card company!

Talking with the services lady helped me a little bit, but it left me more confused. We realized that the person, whoever the hell they may be, had used a card that was never even activated. How the hell does someone use a card that we, the owners of said card, had never activated because we knew we would never use them? To make matters even more strange, we SHREDDED the cards because we both knew we were never going to use them, and would just eventually let the bank close the card if they complained after a few years.

This goes back to my original point. How the fuck does someone use a card that was never activated in the first place? There is something really sketchy about the whole thing, because in order to use a damn credit card you have to know ALL of the information available, including the damn security code on the back of the card.

Where this really gets annoying is that there had to have been a leak somewhere, we just don't know when or how. I have to follow up with the bank and make sure they alert others to determine if this is a larger security incident or what. Because we never used the card, activated the card or even physically did anything with the card besides shred the damn thing, the numbers were never available online cached somewhere in a form or browser.

This goes back to why we use credit cards instead of other means like a debit card. Credit cards, you have the bank to help fight with you to figure out where things went sideways. Many times, if a debit card is stolen for information the bank may or may not reimburse you for stolen funds, and you have a lot of headache to fix. With a credit card, you replace the card and most times the bank wants to keep you as a customer so they will do a lot of the legwork to get things fixed for you which is nice!

I'm not sure how this situation is going to play out but this was definitely not something we thought would happen. Hopefully we don't have anything like this happen again!

What about you, have you had your information stolen at all? What happened? Let me know in the comments!