I've often said privacy is a myth. More evidence for that conclusion arrived just yesterday on my clever phone. I received a text message with an authentication code I should use to verify activity at my Facebook account. My first reaction was utter disbelief. Those codes are only generated when somebody tries to hack into an account and doesn't have the proper credentials. I wasn't doing that.
An old hacker trick is to go to a website with a known username and click the "forgot my password" link. That will generally start a process to reset the password. Back in the old days you were redirected to a web page that allowed you to reset the password on the spot. Thus it was simply and easy to hack into an account.
It's not that easy anymore, unless you make it that way. Most websites will now require TFA (two factor authentication) to make any major changes such as passwords or user names. The problem is that the TFA has to be set up in advance in order for it to work. If you never set up a second authorization method, your account is vulnerable to attack by any 13 year old. By far the most used second authentication method is via a text message to your mobile telephone. I've not given Facebook that number because I know they use it to track my whereabouts in the real world. I did, however, give them a backup e-mail address to which they can send me notices that somebody is doing something I need to be aware of.
All that is pretty standard, don't you think? So, given that I never gave Facebook my mobile phone number, how is it they were able to send me a text message on my clever phone? There is only one connection. The e-mail address I gave Facebook is from G-mail, a Google service. It so happens that Google knows my phone number even though I never gave it to them either. They know it because I bought my phone from them and it is running their Android OS. Thus they gave me the number and burned that information into the phone's memory. Which brings me back to the question of how did Facebook get my mobile phone number? There is only one way that would be possible. The bastards share information without asking me first (because it's in their TOS, so no need to ask).
Or it could be a Scammer and if you click the link it will take you to a FAKE Farcebook page.
Everything will look legit because they made an exact copy of the Farcebook pages relating to such request.
There are many on Farcebook who will copy your Profile Page and then send messages to your Friends List with some reason they want you to accept their new friend request. I will go to the Real Person and ask them if they set up a second page. 99% of the time, no they did not. So I don't accept the friend request, and send in a Report to Farcebook.
By the way, Farcebook just got fined 9 billion dollars for sharing private data!
Probably much more to it than that we haven't been told about.
I belonged to a couple of Farcebook Pages that were set to Private.
Something happened and it got switched to Public, but only for like half a day.
In that short amount of time, some hacker got in and got the phone numbers of all those members who had put it on one of the contact lists for members only. This is why I never put anything on any website that I don't want made public.
You describe what has become common tactics on Facebook, but it's not what I'm talking about. Certain methods for two factor authentication (TFA) require that you not only enter your name and password but also a random numeric code that is only valid for less than 5 minutes. The code is sent by Facebook, in this instance, and not by a scammer. The only instruction accompanying the numeric code is to use it to complete the transaction that requires it. There is no link nor mention of what that transaction might be.
The fake web sites you mention specifically are there to harvest login names and passwords. They may ask for that code but never send it because all they want are your credentials. The friend requests from fake friends are often related to identity theft. It's often innocuous in appearance because the are looking for more subtle things such as pictures of your home and family that you might have in your account. You typically would not know they are stealing everything that identifies you until somebody used your personal information to do something nasty in some other state or country. That could be weeks, months, or even years after the reaping of your identity.
That $5 billion fine by the FTC is nothing to shake a stick at, but it will come out of the petty cash box and I doubt that it's going to hurt Facebook's bottom line. Mark Zuckerberg has been cited for being complicit in using Facebook's resources for social engineering. It's been shown how Facebook can and has influenced election results, for example. Sharing user information with market analysts such as Cambridge Analytica is part of the cyber war for influence over large groups of people. My personal opinion is that the fine isn't enough and that Facebook, if it is allowed to exist at all, should be broken down to several smaller sized operations whose influence is limited.
Back when I owned 21 houses, you would not believe the number of stupid questions asked by banks and credit card companies, and/or credit reporting agencies. In many cases, it turned out they were just building up a database to prevent fraud. The Internet was not as prolific back then like it is today, and apparently ID thief's would see records at city hall and use them to try to obtain credit somewhere using my name and whatever data they could glean about me from public records.
Today, with the Internet it is a 100 times worse. And I'm sure the banks have an even harder time of getting factual data, especially from me. When I get a call that appears to be a Robocall, I block the calling number by putting it on my blacklist. Same with e-mail requests for info. Marked as Junk but sent straight to Trash automatically after the first try.
I figure a real bank would be live on the phone, not a long delay and a recording hi hi.
I also get many scam requests via e-mail of which the reply to address in the link doesn't match the banks actual e-mail address. Some are made to look like the real thing, but if you look really close, or double check, they are not.
At first I used to call the bank to see if they tried to contact me, but most banks have so many departments, they have no idea of someone tried to call me, so now I just ignore them completely.
Last year I got a bill from a credit card company, it was already over 120 days past due, and I had no account with them.
Whoever it was that set up that account, even though they used my name, they had the address wrong. There are three roads here all with the same number and street name, but the suffix is different.
I called them on the phone and after getting past the collections department to their security department, we were able to get things straightened out fairly fast. The guy asked if I could send him a picture of myself. I did one better than that, I sent him to my website, and he checked while I was on the phone. He said the picture they have of the person who got the credit card wasn't even close to my picture. Plus my website answered a couple of other question that were wrong on the application. He thanked me, and that was that, never heard from them again.
I think all social media sites need to have some very strict regulations set in place they must follow, once they cross a certain number of members, so the little guys are not hassled so much by government red tape.
There was even talk a couple of years ago about a person having to get a federal ID number to open a social media account, even though they could still use a screen name. It got shot down as government invasion of privacy, hi hi.
Some Internet based financial institutions are pretty clever, as are the credit score keepers. I like to use virtual machines and different browsers to conduct any online business securely. I also never allow them to "remember" me so that each time I use the service I have to prove who I am. They are pretty clever and figure out what I'm doing most of the time, but once in a while I fit the possible fraud profile. They then say that they will ask me a series of questions to prove my identity. One such question might be, "What city did you live in in 1996?" Well, that's the year I bought my house and is recorded in the public records. They make it a multiple choice question and are clever enough to name four places located near the actual place I lived. Typically three questions will satisfy them, but if I make a mistake on one of them they will ask more. All of what they ask is indeed a matter of public record and nothing I gave to them personally. A clever phisher could do the same research, but it would take a lot of effort in order to know where to look me up. That's where Facebook comes in. A lot of that personal ID information is published unwittingly there by unsuspecting users.
Most security conscious sites will have you come up with a secret question that you must answer in lieu of those multiple choice questions. Those secret questions are a joke because they are nearly always the same. Your mom's maiden name? Your first pet? Your best friend in grammar school? All that can be had off places like Facebook too. But, people don't realize that you don't have to be truthful with the answers. You must be consistent, however. If my best buddy was named Harry, well maybe I can say it was Melvin. So every place they want to know my best buddy would get Melvin for an answer. Look it up on Facebook and there is no Melvin in my friends column. LOL In a majority of the cases phone number requests can be handled the same way. They just use it for tracking purposes and rarely have a need to call you. As a side benefit, when they sell your phone number to a robot, they are selling the wrong information. LOL
On a more somber note, Facebook is involved with some pretty serious underhanded activity. It all started out innocently enough, I'm sure, but when you have access to 2 BILLION people's personal information, that suddenly becomes extremely valuable information. Facebook makes a living off what it sells to solicitors, but that same information can be used by state actors to influence behaviors. In Facebook's case, there are clear signs of how it can and did influence past elections. A place like Facebook should not have that kind of power.
With all the computers I have here, when I go to do something at my bank, I have to go through the routine bank of questions too. A couple of them I have no idea how to answer and it doesn't have a pass to next question box. So I put something in I might remember for the next time, but never seem to remember it. But like you, if you give an answer, they move onto the next question.
One question that really trips me up is when they ask where I opened my account give branch number. Heck, the bank changed hands several times, and along with it the branch number, before this bank bought them out. Over time I forgot the original bank name, but did manage to get a valid branch number to use for that question after a trip to our local bank. This was one you could not skip or answer wrong to or it dropped your access.
After enough times of this, I talked to the head of our local bank, and he gave me a way around all of those questions, with a link only I would know what to enter. Regardless of what the first question was, I am supposed to type a certain key combination, and then it will pop up with enter your number, which I do, and then I'm in right away. Even the browser does not ask me if I want to save that info, because I don't think it sees it or that second box. The number also has to be entered using the keypad, not the numbers on the keyboard.
I've never used any word or phrase I use for security questions anywhere on social media.
I've been paranoid about that since the very first website I ever joined.
Speaking of passwords, I tried a little trick my step-son uses for his passwords.
It works for most websites too, but not all of them.
You have to type out your password on a text editor first, because it uses characters that are not on the keyboard, but part of the normal character set, such as the cents sign.
Here is a simple example: YCHJCU25¢ftJB
That is an easy password to remember. It means: Your Curiosity Has Just Cost U 25 Cents for the Juke Box.
I've seen him use some more complicated ones, but it seems they all have to be in the Latin extended set or it won't work.
Never trust social media about your data, that's how they make their money!
Your bank is way more demanding than my bank. LOL The people I'm banking with originally were located downtown Chicago. They branched out to the suburbs after some lengthy legal hassles. I don't even recall the issues now, but branch banking didn't always exist. That was about the time I signed up with them ... somewhere. It might have been at the downtown main bank or one of it's branch locations. It was probably the closest to me physically but I could not tell you were it was if my life depended on it. These guys are pretty successful but are now owned by a Canadian banking consortium. To my utter surprise they had two branches right here in good ol' O'Fallon. They are closing down one of them next month which happens to be the one closest to my home. I now have to travel 7 miles to the remaining bank if I want to talk to a real person. They are one of the companies I deal with who have a list of public information about me and will give me that multiple choice test to verify my identity. Oddly enough they don't ask about my prior history with them.
Most login credentials are actually limited in the characters you can use. Some places I go to still only want numbers or alphas, nothing else. Others will list out which special characters you can use, and still others say use anything. The use of special characters is better than not having them, but they don't add very much security. The length of the pass phrase is what makes it secure or not. Something like "I.live.in.O'Fallon,MO.63366.FOR.three.years" is actually harder to crack than YCHJCU25¢ftJB. Most people wouldn't think of using personal information for their password, but it's actually pretty safe. It all gets hashed and nobody but you knows what's in there. My LAN password is 24 characters long and drives my granddaughters crazy when they try to enter it into their smartphones. LOL
Both of my WiFi routers only use an 8 digit number but that only gives them guest access to the LAN.
Unless I add their name to the user group, they can't even save anything to a folder, or read things not considered shared. Or something like that, haven't looked at it in eons. Usually they just want Internet access which it gives them that, but not necessarily access to the LAN, although they are on the LAN. You probably understand that better than I do.
After I moved to Creve Coeur, and they built a bank darn near in my front yard, I switched and started using them.
They were not part of a larger conglomerate at the time they were built. About the same as my old bank, independent.
But then they merged with another bank, and a few years later joined a banking system of whom they were with the rest of the time I lived there. It was after I had moved south that they were bought out by Regions, and it has been Regions ever since. Which was actually a benefit to me, as there were Regions banks every few blocks down here. They did close the one closest to me, but there are others all within 3 miles in any direction I decide to go.
The only thing I cannot do is physically change my business account from Missouri to Tennessee because TN does not have the same type of LLC as we had back home. Besides, I don't want my LLC down here, way too costly. In MO my LLC was a one time fee to get set up permanently. Down here, an LLC has an annual fee nearly double of my one-time fee back home.
I turned off guest access to my router. It is in fact limited in function, but it's also easier to hack. The router is directly wired to the modem, and the modem is the Internet for all intents and purposes. As you know routers these days can do a lot more than just talk to a modem and the clients on the LAN. Having more than one type of access seems like an unnecessary complication. I don't know about the router, but the server and the clients on my LAN all have access permissions that are settable. If I want to keep anybody out, that's how I would do it. Every once in a while I will see some strange MAC address attached to my network. Each time it's been innocuous and probably just a neighbor who doesn't know any better than to stay off my net. LOL Those are easy to deal with by blocking that MAC address.
If it wasn't for the greenbacks dispensed by their ATM machines, I'd never have reason to visit my bank. Most all of what I do is online. O'Fallon isn't quite like it was up north in that each bank seems to have it's own ATM network. My bank card won't work in any machine but the ones physically located on the bank's property. Up north I could go just about anywhere to use the card, for a whopping big fee if it was out of the bank's network. That wasn't good, but at least I didn't have to travel 8 miles to get a pocketful of $20 bills.
The new router I put up here in my office to use as an Access Point keeps a log file, and I have it set to send a message if anyone tries to connect to it that is not already in the list.
That almost drove me nuts for a couple of days until I got it set up right.
It seems when you turn on a computer, it looks for what WiFi networks are available and shows them on the users screen.
This doesn't mean they tried to connect to my router, just that it was pinged I guess.
So I changed it to show only if someone connects to it and tries to enter a password.
So far that has only happened about three times, and was only one attempt. So I guess a neighbor with a laptop simply clicked the wrong WiFi connection and realized it when his password failed.
Our crazy ATM for my bank is back to giving out 100s and 50s again. I hate that. But learned if I request 280 bucks instead of 300, it will give 4 fifties and the rest in twenties. Sometimes it may give 1 one-hundred, 2 fifties, and the rest in twenties. They have machines all over the place so I don't have to go to the bank to get cash. But you can only make an off-hours deposit at the ATM on the bank parking lot.
My wife's banks ATM let's her select Only Twenties, but you have to look close because that option is not in the normal list in the middle of the screen, it is way up in the upper right hand corner away from everything else.
If the ATM machines from my bank offer denomination choices for payouts, I have not found them yet. All I ever have received from those machines was $20 bills, and that goes back many years. It might have been different in the beginning, but I don't recall that far back. There is a bank I can almost walk to on the north end of town. I looked into their products to see if there was something small I could buy into just to give me access to their ATM machine. There is a checking account that seems to have not only ATM but some other kind of purchase cards too. I didn't really understand the blurb very well. I'd have to maintain a certain balance and deposit at least $300 a month in order to avoid penalties. Plus, there is an $8 service charge just to have the privilege of them handling my checking account. I currently pay $2 a month and don't like that either. I'll have to look into more banks; we have plenty of them in town. I have a feeling the good ol' days of free banking are gone.
Unfortunately, my business account has dropped under three grand, so I too now have to pay a monthly service fee.
They already hit me up for 3 bucks to print out my 2 or 3 checks I write per month.
I've never had to pay a fee before, and they base the fee on how much is in your account at the close of each months session, but they do use an average daily balance summary as well. Not sure exactly how that works. I was billed a service fee of 5 dollars the month before last, but only 3 dollars last month.
I have a saving account at another bank because it is linked to my credit card cash earnings.
I had to start it with 300 bucks to avoid a fee. It has now grown to close to 2 grand.
They constantly offer reward programs, but I don't qualify for any of them.
About the only people who could qualify are folks with three or more sources of income being direct deposited.
My wife's checking is with a credit union about 15 miles from here. She opened the account when she lived and worked in the Maryville area. Not exactly sure how they work, but she pays no fees, and does get a dividend check from them every quarter. It isn't much, usually only 4 to 8 bucks, even so, they send a 1099 each year for me to add to our tax returns. It was only 16 dollars for last year, hi hi.
One of the things I like about my current checking account is that I can view it online. As such I can see images of the checks that cleared and download them if I care to. They will charge me if I want a paper copy, but I never have a use for that. The checking accounts that offer interest require a minimum I'm not sure I can maintain. If I don't comply they charge a fee and wipe out any interest I earn, which is way less than 1% to begin with. The average daily balance is how they determine how much the monthly fee would be. You would think they actually calculate the average when they apply the fee. They do list the average on my monthly statement, but it's meaningless. If for one moment during the current cycle my balance drops below the minimum, they zap me with the fee. It doesn't matter if the other 29 days of the month were well above the minimum. So, I have no idea why they bother with the average daily balance. It must apply to yet another fee that is hidden.
I've only looked in a couple places so far and it seems as if my bank has the best rates. This is also true with the interest they pay on CD's. There are a lot of placed I didn't look yet. It's possible somebody has a better deal. All I can say is that banking is no longer free as it once used to be.
Many major banks got into trouble for deducting checks before adding the days deposits in order to add extra fees.
Now with nearly every part of your account digitized and handled electronically, they no longer manually do batches that way. We don't see it on our statement, just the days date, but what we don't see is the exact time to the split second a document was entered, whether it be a check or a deposit, or an automatic withdrawal.
I know the signs are still up that say deposits made after 11:30am will appear on the next days transactions. Although they no longer really apply. Even so, I don't think they get applied, even though they handed you a deposit receipt, until the teller closes her batch. I know different banks do things different ways, even if they use the same programs.
The reason I pay the three bucks to have an image of the checks on the back of my statement is so I can go back several years to get one if I need it. I don't think you can get an image of a cancelled check from the bank on-line after X number of days, which may be several months, heck some banks may be for a year or two.
I used to pay to get my cancelled checks back for a long time after they went with imaging. This way I had the info on the back of the check also. But a lawyer told me if I have the actual bank statement, the info on the back of the check is on the statement itself and counts as date of cancellation of the check. That's when I switched to paying for a digital image, which was much cheaper. Only 3 bucks a month, for my lonely one or two checks now. But when I was in real estate, I had perhaps 30 to 50 checks a month if not more.
On checking accounts 1000 dollars might get you 1/4th of a cent per month, hi hi.
Saving is about 1 cent per month. Almost not worth bothering with.
Which is why I would convert to CDs when I could. At least then I got 8 cents a month.
Back when I worked and got a salary, I had so much of my paycheck each month go to a Savings Bond.
Almost forgot to cash some in when they matured. Seems like a 100 dollar savings bond only cost like 88 bucks then they would send it to you. In 15 years they could be cashed in for 100 bucks. I think they stopped earning interest as of the cash in date. My mom had bought some EE bonds for my kids, and they were 30 year bonds. My son cashed his in early, and my daughter lost hers somewhere along the line. Although I'm fairly certain she cashed them in really early and just forgot.
Back when they had them, my dad and I both bought several Municipal 5-year Bonds. Actually, that's where I got the money to buy my 1976 50th Anniversary Special Edition TransAm, but still had to finance some of it. The ex-wife took it and left me with the payment book, hi hi.
When they stopped sending the actual canceled checks back and instead printed them on the back of the monthly statement, both sides of the check were there. They only did that for a little while and encouraged me to go entirely paperless. As you noted, I could look up a digitized check, but the history went back only one year. I'd keep the paper copies for five years or more but never had to go back looking for a check as far as I can remember. Now I take the attitude that it's not my problem anymore. What bothers me is that the bank stopped with all the services but STILL feels I need to pay them a monthly fee. This is what they call negative interest.
Those series E savings bonds changed over the years. I'm not sure you can even buy them anymore. My grandparents got a few for me when I was born and I recall cashing them in sometime before I was married. That's when mom was cleaning out her drawers and decided I should store my own paperwork. LOL It seems like the cash value was about double the face value after about 20 years. The interest kept compounding but to be honest I don't know for how long. All told it amounted to less than $500. Some of the bonds were only $50 or so.
Don't know if it is true or not, since only my dad's oldest brother is who made this claim.
But he said that most of the money used to build the greenhouse we called the new greenhouse, even though we had built several since then, all came from War Bonds my grandfather bought.
My dad, who handled the company accounting said the funds to build that greenhouse came from the sale of land, the land where Schnucks market was later built. The sale was made to get rid of the high tax frontage.
This made sense to me, since grandpa bought deep and deeper yet, and then later sold off even more of our frontage.
Manchester Road WAS Route-66 at that time, and taxes nearly doubled over the course of five years, then doubled again when the road was widened.
Also, almost all of grandpa's investments were into the movie industry. He just managed to pick all the wrong ones, hi hi.
I had to go back through checks for six years to find a check to prove I paid for something.
I was actually getting really worried because I couldn't remember for sure how long ago I had bought the items.
Plus I had claimed I bought the entire shipment of them only about three or four years ago.
I was moving some storage boxes in my basement, left over from when I moved from Des Peres to Creve Coeur and found a case of packaged costume jewelry and several packaged sets of assembled rope chains.
I had placed them for sale on eBay and somebody saw them and claimed they were stolen from their stores storage room like 14 to 16 months ago. I forget what state they were in, but they filed a suit against me, which I ignored at first thinking it was a prank, since I knew I had mine for years.
I was handed a summons by one gnarly looking dude who came to my door. Thankfully I only had to appear at our local court house. Already familiar with how courts worked, if I plead not guilty I would have to come back again a month later, so the only thing I brought with me was the shipping label from the box which clearly showed the source, weight, and my previous address. It just so happened it was the same company who they bought their product from, so this only proved I had the box, which seemed to make matters worse at first. I needed to find the invoice, which I knew I could not do, or proof of payment. For once I was glad I kept all of my checks, hi hi.
A month and a half later at my next court appearance, I presented the check, and also the pictures I had taken which I used on eBay, along with a printout of the dates the pictures were taken.
The judge was not at all interested in anything except my cancelled check. I showed him the original, plus gave him a Xerox copy of the front and back for him to keep. He said he would check it out and scheduled me for another appearance a month later. I never had to go back, the court sent me a letter saying the case was dropped.
It never said why it was dropped, was it because of my check or perhaps the guy suing me found out who really stole his merchandise. Not to long after this, I mentioned it to our family attorney and he said he would check to see for me.
When he did get back to me, he said the case was dropped because my whereabouts was known for the time of the theft.
I asked how they knew where I was, when they don't even know for sure when the items were stolen. All he said was, there are any way of several they could have found it would have been impossible for me to be there at the time.
There was one other instance where I was in trouble, this time with a police department out in Sullivan, MO.
I got a ticket for parking the tractor-trailer I was driving on a street marked no-trucks. Ironically, I was right behind another tractor-trailer, we were both delivering to the same place. I had to wait for him to unload so walked down the street to have lunch. I got back just as he was pulling away and pulled up to let their crew unload, only they had all left for lunch too, hi hi. I walked across the street to another restaurant to play a pinball machine, in clear view of my truck out the windows. I didn't see the cop pull up, but saw them step up and stick a ticket under my windshield. I ran out and told them I was making a delivery at that address. Too bad, was all he said and went back to his car.
Although I was POed, when I got home I called, got the fine amount, and wrote them a check and mailed it.
A couple of months later I get a letter forwarded to me from the trucking company about an unpaid parking ticket.
I told them I wrote a check and mailed it to them. I even looked at my check stubs and gave them the check number of the check. But I couldn't find it in my cancelled check box, nor did it appear on my statement.
Great, now I had to not only pay the fine but a stiff penalty on top of it.
This time I got a cashiers check from the bank, sent it return receipt requested.
Finally cleared that up, since the post office sent me the receipt back and I stapled it to my original check stub.
Shortly after that, I was throwing away some old magazines, and inside one of the magazines was the original check I had mailed, returned by the post office for insufficient postage. There was no stamp on the envelope at all. But it was evident there was a stamp on there at one time. This was about the time the post office started using those self-stick stamps. Turns out, they come off in a hot mailbox in the summer. They have since changed the type of adhesive used, but in the early years of self-stick, it was a big problem. And of course, as Murphy's Law dictates, it affected me, hi hi.
I'd be in a world of trouble if I had to come up with a canceled check to prove a purchase. I have bank statements going back ten years, but not physical checks. If I ever had to prove I purchased something, I don't recall doing it. You would think after all these years there would have been some questions along the way. But, as I see it now, the banking system has taken away all my means of proving my financial transactions are valid when they stopped returning the cleared checks. It's all supposed to be electronic these days anyway, so if they want to see a check they can just go ahead and use Photoshop to make one.
My wife doesn't have her checks imaged either.
But where I only get the date, check number, and amount.
She gets the date, check number, the name and account number of who cashed it including the zip code, and the amount.
Sorta like you get under the direct withdrawals list.
This information could easily take the place of the canceled check!
I get more information off my credit card billing statement than I do out of my checking account. The same problem exists with credit cards as is presently in place with checks. There is no way for you or I to obtain physical evidence of a transaction being completed. We have to rely on third parties keeping records in their computers and hope it's all accurate. I will add that the credit card people seem pretty friendly when there is a dispute. I've had a few cards replaced already because of mysterious charges that they forgave or resolved. There was even a case of fraud where somebody was billing us automatically after their service was canceled. The credit card people got on the case and even got us some of the erroneous charges back. The people handing my checking account only know how to add fees and penalty payments when there is a problem in their accounts.
Out of the clear blue sky, my credit card company will issue me a new card saying there was a breach or fraudulent use of my card. They never say what it was, but obviously they caught it right away. I normally get a phone call if they suspect an unusual charge for me.
I use steam kettles to make my product, and the steam generator module went bad. Luckily a local company happen to have one in stock so I drove over there to get it. When they ran my credit card, they didn't say it was declined, the screen just told them to wait for pending transaction. My cell phone rang and it was my credit card company wanting to know if I was at Nelsons Equipment Company because a transaction was pending. I said yes I am, I'm buying a repair part for my steam kettle. I hadn't even hung up yet and the transaction cleared on the terminal.
I did have one really strange charge appear on my credit card, it wasn't much, only like 28 bucks is all. I almost didn't catch it because it was a store my wife shops at occasionally, but she rarely if ever using my company credit card and never for a personal purchase. But sometimes she grabs the wrong card, since my business card and her personal card are nearly identical in color and design. So I asked her about it. No she didn't make a charge on my card, in fact she had not been to that store in several months. So I called the CC company and they had already reversed the charge because the store called them and said one of their employees were caught running charges on previous customers cards. And they gave them a list of the credit card numbers she had used and ours was on the list. They said this happens more often with restaurants than with small boutiques.
And speaking of restaurants. About five years ago I caught four charges for meals that I know I didn't eat.
I did eat there quite often, so I guess they thought they could get by squeezing in a couple extra meals and I wouldn't notice. How I caught it was the charges were on days I would never have been up in that area. I only ate there when I took Debi's mom to the doctor, which although was sometimes 2 or 3 times a week, we would only eat at that place once in a given week, and definitely NOT on a day she didn't have a doctors appointment. She never had a Wednesday doctors appointment either, and when I checked the date of the transactions, 3 of the 4 were on Wednesdays.
At first the CC company didn't believe me, thought I was trying to get out of paying a few of those charges, but then when she looked up the account, THEY can tell if the charge was run from the actual credit card, or if the number was typed in by hand on the terminal. BAM, she reversed all charges at that restaurant that were hand entered going back for like 3 months. So they were getting me more than I realized. But I do think I did eat there on a couple of those times, but why they would have hand entered the number I don't know. I didn't argue about them reversing charges, hi hi.
