Gulp

The phone rang early this morning and the caller asked to speak to Denny. It seems someone tried to use our debit card to wire a very large amount of money in Las Vegas. Fortunately, it was more than was in our account so the credit card company called us to confirm we were authorizing this transfer. Since we were not attempting to transfer money, the company immediately cancelled our debit card to prevent any further use of the number.

The thing is, Denny has the debit card in his pocket--it has not been stolen. Whether a wait staff person made a copy of the number (Denny tends to allow the wait person to take the card to the cash register for him--no more!) or what, we don't know. Monday we'll have to call our bank to arrange for another card.

In the meantime, I've placed a fraud alert with Equifax as advised by this site. This will allow us to obtain a free copy of our credit report also. It's a very good idea to obtain a copy of your credit report annually. You are entitled to one free and the fraud site advises using this website rather than going to one of the three credit reporting services directly (they'll lure you into buying credit protection and annual reports for a fee, etc.)

For the most part, I'm comfortable with ordering items online and we use our debit card for all our purchases wherever we go. We'll just have to be a tad more cautious in the future and keep a close watch on our credit report to see if there are anymore attempts at abuse, although since our debit card has been de-activated we're hoping this will nip any future fraud in the bud.

We're just glad that the criminal who tried this got greedy and went for too much, otherwise they could have cleared out our account quickly. Small favor.