more crime!
I really don't think I did, but I was out drinking that night, so I suppose I should just go ahead and ask. Michael, Matt, Ezra, Sam, Sarah and everyone else who was out on Friday: did we get drunk at Townhouse and then go grocery shopping in Michigan? Normally I wouldn't ask, but Bank of America sent me an email on Saturday morning wondering about these charges:
I've gone ahead and ordered a new card, but man oh man will I ever feel sheepish if I find a cancelled and beer-stained Kroger receipt lying around the apartment a week from now.
More seriously, this has been surprisingly easy to deal with — I had the whole thing wrapped up and a temporary ATM card in hand within about an hour of getting the initial alert email. It's a real credit to Bank of America, I think, and even more noteworthy when you consider how essentially evil an organization they are.
The obvious question to ask is how the crook got my number at all. I haven't been patronizing internet retailers particularly much in the last week or two, but I did make a few suspect purchases:
- A while ago I ordered something from SparkFun Electronics. But those guys are great, and I've ordered from them once before. I don't think it could be them.
- I bought a new cellphone battery from a somewhat shady Ebay retailed not too long ago. But I made the payment through PayPal (or Yahoo stores; I forget which), so I kind of doubt it was them.
- The final and most troubling possibility is the Wii: I bought Super Mario 64 about an hour before leaving the house on Friday night, and did so by using the Wii's integrated store. But surely Nintendo processes payments securely, right? Right?
My childlike faith in the internet makes it hard for me to believe that it's any of these candidates. I haven't gone through my back statements to check for earlier fraud, so it could have happened before these three candidates — I just don't know. There's also a non-electronic possibility: it could've been stolen when I opened a tab at DC9 on Thursday night, too. I did end up with a suspiciously low bar tab.
Anyway, it's all very mysterious, but for now the danger seems to have passed.
Comments
Chances are this person has had your card number for months. Look back through your old statements for small charges, $1-$10. They'll usually charge a couple small things to see if you're paying attention and then go for big purchases.
It's most likely that your information wasn't given out by one of your favorite retailers, but lost by poor security practice. The real question is whether the company that lost it knows and hasn't told you (illegal if they have clients in California, Illinois, and a few others) or if they're so insecure they don't know.
Well, I've gone through my statements back to October, but nothing else seems to be amiss. I suspect that these guys decided they'd just go for one quick cash grab (with the hope, perhaps, that keeping it under $400 wouldn't attract attention).
Yeah, in the big grab they usually blitz a bunch of items or go for one big ticket. It would seem you've been hit by unintelligent fat people.
Unless you've been to Michigan recently, these people probably bought some numbers through sketchy IRC channels. Every person with a credit card can assume that can happen to them at any time.
I work in IT security with a focus on personally identifiable information. If there were no legislation or PCI, maybe 1 in 50 companies would even care about losing your data. The ones that do today generally just worry about the consequences.
An older and wiser friend of mine once gave me these words of wisdom: "Cash is for the bar".
We were both drunk when he said it and it sounded much more profound at the time. We were on a trip and i wanted to pay cash for a meal.
NEVER open a bar tab on a credit card. For one, more than one bartender acquaintance in college as boasted about putting the drinks of pretty girls of the tab of drunk patrons.
The other reason is that someone working at the bar stole your cc# and the 3 or 4 digit number on the back.
Charge (or debit) dinner, charge late night snacks, gas, whatever, but save your cash for the bar.