Keep an eye on your credit card statements, folks

[ktmeadows]

So my parents are in town for their annual October visit. This morning, Dad got a call on his cell from his credit card company's fraud alert saying that his card had been used at a Walmart and a small bank in the Atlanta suburbs today, and was he actually anywhere near Atlanta?

The current hypothesis from the fraud investigator is that someone got a credit card number from Dad while we were at a Destin/SoWal restaurant in the past couple of days, and sold the number to someone else who made a new card with that number and a card blank. They did a test run at the Walmart to make sure it worked, then went to the bank and got a $2000 cash advance against the card. All that effort onthe part of the crooks, and I'm sure Dad wasn't the only one this happened to.

I had a similar thing happen while staying at an Atlanta hotel on business several years ago. The hotel was the only place I used that particular credit card. All I know is that when I got my bill, there were several phone charges from the hotel to a private residence in New York. The charged amounted to several hundred dollars.