Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Dealing with Fraudulent Charges - the Start of the Story

(Good grief, this is the 301st entry of this blog - how'd that happen?)

I logged in this morning to find an overdraft alert email from my bank. First concern is - is it a legit email, but the language looked correct and more importantly they quote the correct last 3-4 digits of the account number.

I log into the account online (what did we ever do before the internet?), and what do I find? Two different charges from Wal Mart (where I never shop fortunately) totaling over $800. Yikes, to the phone I go to call my bank (after grabbing the checkbook so I have the account number).

The person helping said that these were ACH "checks" which is a paper check converted to an electronic check. She also pointed out that the check number of the original check is listed there. The number was just a little ahead of my current check number, and she asked if I had that check number with me. Fortunately I did and assured her I was looking at my own version of that check number.

She explained to me that they were going to investigate to see whether or not it was a simple mistake (like a digit transposition), or actual fraud. I had to answer some formal questions and got an incident number. Because there were two charges we had to do it twice and I noticed that the second number was 13 above the first. I asked "you mean that it's possible that 12 other cases were filed in the last 2 minutes?" She assured me that given the call center size that it was more than possible. Yikes.

Because it's not clear if it's fraud or not they weren't suggesting closing the account just yet, so we're leaving it open for now.

The plot thickens in the next entry...

No comments: