Debit Card Fraud Pt. 2

So here’s the story:

Apparently my debit card number got stolen somehow. I don’t know if it was online, a restaurant, or what. I’ll probably never find out.

Monday night I got an email from Target saying they detected an account that was opened using a CC # I already had on my amazon.com account (target and amazon share accounts). I wasn’t sure if it was spam or what so I started poking around.

I logged into my online banking site to find about 30 purchase authorizations made, a few thousand worth that dropped my available balance to -$700. I called card services and cancelled the debit card service asap.

As a side note, my account has a “Current Balance” (what’s actually in the account), and an “Available Balance” (what I can actually use in the account). My Current Balance was still not touched, just my Available Balance because of all of the pending authorization charges. So what’s happening is because of all of these authorization charges are getting made that exceed my Current Balance, my Available Balance drops into the negative and pretty much freezes my funds in the account.

The next morning comes and almost all of the pending transactions are canceled and gone from the account. Only two get posted, and my Available Balance was almost back to normal. I thought it was gonna be over then. But then I get to work, check the account and see that more authorization charges appear. My Available Balance drops to $-800 now. Joy. At 9am I went a local branch by work to talk about the problem and was told I pretty much have to wait until charges hard post and clear before I can dispute them and get my money back.

As of this morning, 3 of yesterday’s 15 or so pending charges got posted and ate just over $1100 of my Current Balance (now I’m really losing money). The rest got declined and disappeared, but again more showed up bringing my available balance back down to -$900.

It’s quite the pain in the ass. Even though I have money in the account, it’s all been frozen cause of the pending charges coming in still. So far it looks like the theft made about $5000 worth of purchase attempts and about $1200 got through.

Capital One says I can dispute everything that gets through and will have zero liability, so I’ll get it all back. It just takes times to get it all processed, especially if they just keep on showing up every morning. If these keeps up, my account will just be stuck in hell for a days/weeks.

In the mean time, I have no money, a baby due any day, we didn’t get to eat Popeye’s on Mardi Gras, and oh yeah, my car’s fuel pump decided to crap out and that’s a $600 – $1000 repair.

But there’s a funny side to all of this. One of the charges that actually got posted was for Gevalia, a mail order coffee company. Yesterday we got home from work to find a box from Gevalia. I don’t know if it was intentionally shipped to me or what, but the account only had my name and address on it. So I called them up and got the account canceled and they issued a refund. Handle it all very nicely. As a bonus, they let me keep the box containing a coffee maker, and some coffee.

Now I’m just waiting for a drum set or something and golf clubs to show up from the two charges that were posted this morning were from an online music store and a golf store

Best week ever…. Not.