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Each day, millions of people in all parts of the world conduct billions of swiped transactions in stores, restaurants, and at the gas pumps.  Such is the world we now live in. I watched a super scary special on tv, which said that fraud was becoming really popular, and that by 2014, 70% of people will experience fraud. Paper checks have become a thing of the past, a curiosity at best, and a last resort for most of us.  But sometimes, things can go terribly wrong with debit cards.  Debit card fraud is on the rise.  Often, people give out their card number and details when making purchases over the phone.  The person who receives that phone call momentarily has full access to your bank account:  they get your credit card number, its expiration date, and the security code on the reverse — in other words, everything they would need to conduct a keyed transaction using your account.  It happens more often than most people think.

Just last week, I was contacted by my bank’s fraud center to alert me to a suspicious transaction.  Someone in a state 400 miles from me had used my debit card to complete a keyed transaction for $3.80.  The transaction was caught and declined by my bank, thank goodness, because they said they believed that had been a “test run” by the criminal in possession of my card information, and that, had it been successful, a much larger amount would have been taken from my account.  The downside of this is that my card had to be immediately cancelled, and a new one, with a new pin, sent to me in the mail — not to arrive for 3-5 business days.  In the meantime, I have bills that are automatically paid each month from the cancelled card, and since I have no new card yet, I can’t change my payment information yet.  Hopefully, the items will not go through as failed drafts.

Sometimes, the way people get your card information is simply by writing it down when you give it to them for some legitimate reason, such as making payments on accounts by phone;  another way is through skimming, where the criminal tampers with the equipment used to swipe your card so that your PIN code is recorded, along with the card number, expiration date, and security code.  So, if anything ever looks obviously tampered with, it’s best not to swipe your card there.