In Which We Find Someone Hacked My Bank Card...

...or Why Yesterday Was Such an Awful Day.

Yesterday was a particularly long day at school. Our class has no specials on Friday, it rained all day which kept the kids in, and, for whatever reason known only to them, they were just loud and out of sorts. On top of all of that we threw a wedding shower for one of our co-workers at the end of the day, so by the time I walked out the door I was more than ready to go home.

The light on the phone was flashing that we had a message and my first thought was it was the doctor calling to confirm Ms. Thang's appointment on Tuesday. She informed me as I waited to punch in my code that was NEXT Tuesday and I hit 1 to retrieve my message. I listened in shock as a woman's voice told me she was calling from the fraud department of my bank and I needed to call such and such a number immediately upon hearing this message. Which I did. Discussion with another kind woman left me informed that someone had gotten hold of my bank card information and had started a spending spree. What they do is make small purchases first, to see if the account is valid, then they go big. Fortunately for me, the awesome people in the fraud department at Visa know what they are doing, and they picked up on it right away. They put a flag on my account, cancelled my card and directed me over to my local branch.

My neighbor's son, who I swear was just in middle school when we moved here, is an important big-wig at my bank now, and took the best care of me. He explained how the whole thing would work, how I would have to go about disputing the charges, and issued me a new card. For the first time since TJ Maxx leaked it's customer's information all those years ago, I have to change my card number. Gone are the days of shopping at 3am and just punching in the number on my keypad. I feel grateful to the folks across the board that kept this from being a bigger issue than it was, and feel angry that people think that this kind of behavior is acceptable.