It’s that time of year when the world is in love (with Christmas shopping. We’re apparently skipping Thanksgiving this year.) Naturally, the thieves are trying to get an early start on grabbing those stocking stuffers, and seem to be looking to stuff their stockings with gifts purchased by defrauding our BB&T credit card. Fortunately, our bank has excellent fraud protection.
Customer service notified my wife and I less than 24 hours after the abnormal transactions began to appear on our account. By mutual agreement BB&T canceled that compromised credit card number so no further charges would get approved, but not before our identity thieves managed to order Walmart gift cards and cell phones through an online account. The customer service representative assured us that we wouldn’t be held responsible for the fraudulent charges, but nevertheless I was perturbed by the idea someone successfully used my name to steal from a business that heavily discounts merchandise to benefit the customers.
Not to mention, credit card holders are forced to pay higher interest rates because the credit card companies can’t afford to eat the losses, either. These thieves were using my identity to steal from you.
We all pay higher prices at Walmart to compensate for the losses to shoplifting. We all pay higher interest rates on our credit cards–not only to mitigate losses due to bankruptcies and failure to pay by the cardholder, but also because of fraud. As a result, I’m not a big fan of liars or thieves.
But in our case, the story has a happy ending. Walmart emailed to notify us the phones were ready to be picked up in the store, so we were able to cancel that order and the fake account set up by the thieves to buy them. Those charges will be easily reversed without loss to Walmart, VISA, or us.
However, there was another remaining charge needing to be resolved for more than $800 that managed to sneak through, but I’m fairly confident that there won’t be any issues having that money refunded, either.
You see, our incompetent thieves screwed up and had the gift cards mailed to me. After all their hard work to set up fake online accounts to steal our hard-earned money, our Christmas thieves got nothing.
In other words, exactly what they deserved.
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