Credit Card Jacked

Saturday morning on vacation this weekend I was woken up by repeated text message ding sounds from my phone.   I’m not unaccustomed to text messages incoming in the early, dark hours of the morning, what with all the running coordination my neighbor and I do, but this was unexpected.   It was multiple messages all within the same minute.    I grabbed the phone and looked at a collection of messages that looked like this:

Given that I was a) asleep and b) not outside the United States, I think we can all guess what was happening.    I wasn’t upset, because with the great text message at point of sale feature a lot of credit cards have now, I knew about the fraudulent charges as they were happening.    I grabbed my phone, went into the bathroom so my talking wouldn’t wake up my husband and called the number.

The fraud person verified it was me while I logged onto my Bank of America account on my iPad.   I noticed the charges—more had come in by now—weren’t showing up on my card.   The gentleman helping me, Andrew, said, “the transactions are being blocked before they ever get to you.   They were flagged suspect when they came in.”

As he and I talked through the card being cancelled and a new card being sent to me, he said, “boy, they are really trying to use that card.”   About that time I got several more charges, this time at over $400 each.   Shortly after that he had disabled the card and the messages stopped.

I’ve never had anything like this happen to me.   It was fairly exciting for a few minutes.   But it didn’t keep me from going back to sleep afterwards, though.

The Big Boy Update:  At lunch today we were talking about friends and toys when my son piped up and said, “don’t forget, I have a hologram of everything I like.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I wish I could say my daughter’s vision was better today than it was the day before or even the week before, but it’s so hard to tell.   There are easy, close, simple things she can’t see at all and then other things in the same range of vision she seems to be able to see.   She can’t see much at all at a far distance from what I can tell, and that doesn’t seem to change.   We went on a big carousel today and at the top she could see a large, blue roof, saying she saw the blue umbrella.    Again, sounds depressing, sorry.  I was hoping to have a better frame of mind today, but it’s so hard to watch her stare blankly into space and not even try to look at things around her.   Tomorrow, I’ll put my positive hat back on and report more.