Folks,

Off topic, but a cautionary word. We do a ton of online banking like many in this day and age.
Pay all of our bills this way through e-payment etc...no paper. We shred all things that relate
to offers or have important info on them before they go in the trash.

Yesterday (sunday) I was notified by fraud detection that we had a sleuth of charges on our
business debit account. The result was whomever swiped the card info and created their own
card version was running through the midwest to the tune of about $3,000.00.

Now at first having not experienced this I thought our money was gone. But thanks to Visa
debit policies your money is back in your account within 5 days of notification and then they
proceed to check into it the next 60 days to try to determine what happened.

Today I noticed that an old email I only use for some basic personal communication had a
mailer daemon email return that I didn't send.

When I looked at the yahoo logins there were logins from Illinois, Finland and Greece on this
account!

Not a happy camper and the emails they were sending outbound were too my auto payment center
and other places I presume they were trying to extract info from.

Anyway, hope you never experience this, know that likely many of you have in one form or another.

I have many friends who use lifelock and other services but I'd never considered it until now, has
me wondering what else these folks accessed.

Just wanted to share, apparently this time of year is prime for this.

Oh and a point on the card they swiped, hadn't been used in over a month by me, so the timing doesn't
agree with shopping or other points of sale.

Justin

The punishment that I would impose is way to severe for the crime. Of course, the punishment the the government doles out is way too lenient.

I read a book recently about privacy. Basically, there is no such thing as privacy or "security" of any type on the internet.

Paul,

I'm with you, wife would like me to not obsess over it, but I do feel like we were robbed even though the money is already back in the account.
The breadcrumbs show that this guy started in CT and went up through Mass and Maine, then shot back through IN, IL and finally Iowa before
the card was cut off by fraud detection.

Dave, I agree even having been ridiculously detailed in our password protection and the way we structure all things related to security questions
and our settings, seems stuff still happens.

We pull annual free credit reports every year and check and have always been solid, but my bank has a "lifelock" type program for about $5.00 a
month that holds all credit cards, debit cards and accounts and social to help keep you from having a serious identity theft. I'm hoping this was
just one random theft somehow, but planning on not finding out.

Wish folks would go work for their money but that is a bit pie in the sky for the human race.

justin