Saturday, March 20, 2010

The Dark Side of Online Purchases

We got a call Friday evening, someone tried using Tara's card at a school in Missouri. This triggered a fraud prevention call. Not sure how that happened, but Tara made a purchase on the Scholastic Books website a couple of days ago. Now her card is disabled, and it happened too late in the day to call the credit union to get things straightened out. It was very loud in the room here at the house when I was trying to interact with the automated system, Tara is hoping it's not the Scholastic order that got stopped, me just not being able to hear. My guess is their site got hacked, and some dude was doing little charges from the info he gathered.

Some would let this stop them from making purchases online. I am not ready to go to that extreme, I make a number of purchases online every month, usually when deals pop up. A couple of days ago I just missed MLB TV premier for the year at $20. (Regularly $120.) I was distracted by work that day, and missed the deal. In the mail today, I got my Superman cuff links. And I don't even own a shirt that I can use cuff links on.


Anyway, I guess a trip to the bank on Monday is in order. And I guess it's time to order a set of credit reports. Anyone have a secondary checking account they use exclusively for online purchases? Think that's too extreme?

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