Fearless Money

In previous posts, I told the sad story of my fraud experience. If you’ve taken the time to read about my credit fraud or my debit fraud experiences, you’ll know that it hasn’t been any fun at all for me. Instead, my experience has been frustrating and enormously wasteful of time and human effort. In this post, I’ll try to find a silver lining in the whole experience.

The only positive element I can come up with is my lessons learned:

1. Banks and credit card companies simply do not care. They will not follow up, and they will certainly not take any proactive actions to block credit fraud. That means it is all on you. Do not expect any help.
2. Start by keeping a written log of timeline, amounts, actions taken, people and companies spoken to. I keep mine as a spreadsheet.
3. If you have any fraud at all, you must close your account.
4. This is especially true with a debit fraud. Your liability is unlimited, and has no horizon. Put more bluntly, once debit fraud starts, you are liable for an infinite amount of money for an infinite time.
5. If you must close your bank account due to debit fraud, it is better to change banks entirely. That way the bank will not be able to “attach” the money in your new account during the inevitable dispute to follow.
6. Actively follow-up. Return all information requested by the creditor or bank. Do this even though legally you may not have to do so.
7. Always look up any unknown charges. Do a quick internet search on the company name. Many scammers will put a test charge in, and if it is not challenged, they’ll start a regular “leak” on your account. Worse, they may hit you with an enormous charge after their trial is not noticed.
8. Charges under $20, especially foreign charges, appear to be possible with no authorization. I personally suspect that this is deliberate on the part of the credit companies, and I consider it to be criminal negligence. The lesson here is to be especially suspicious of such charges.
9. Find out if your credit card allows you to generate “one time use numbers”. American Express, Discover, MBNA and many other companies now allow you to create these numbers via their websites. This works by making a number you can enter on a website which will be valid only once and which must be used within a set amount of time, usually a few months. That way your card is not potentially saved or skimmed from a processing company.
10. Strongly consider ceasing the use of debit cards. Use a cash back credit card and pay it off every month. I know Dave Ramsey would slaughter me for this advice, but it is what I am going to do once I finish changing banks.

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