verbosity

Foiling Fraud

(This entry comes from the but-it-won't-happen-to-me category)

Someone managed to get a hold of my Discover card digits. That doesn't particularly surprise me. I've used it online at many vendors and in person hundreds of times. Several times the card has left my sight for minutes at a time (restaurants, etc.) where the important information could have been skimmed or even hand-copied. Heck, a waiter could have hand-copied it at the register in plain sight of everyone, and I doubt anyone (myself included) would have noticed.

The criminal not-so-wisely attempted to purchase a few items online with values above $700 and $900, in the middle of the night. Discover's anti-fraud pattern-matching system flagged those transactions as being out of the norm for yours truly, so their fraud division gave me a friendly call to ask "what's up, G?". Had the perpetrator made smaller purchases at reasonable hours, it's quite likely that Discover's pattern algorithms would have passed the transactions, and possibly even gone unnoticed by me on my statements. Greed has ruined John Doe's fun.

The irony of the story: A few months ago I began to use Discover's secure online account number system.

Better than single-use numbers, Discover's system lets me establish a persistent but unique number for each online vendor I shop at. Should Amazon.com's database be compromised, I just cancel that specific card sequence. Helps combat fraud (just doing my part, sir!), and makes it simpler to recover full functionality of my account should fraud occur. Of course, it was my main set of digits that was compromised in this case. Thanks, Murphy!

Oh, and be sure to burn all your credit card offers, as shredding them isn't sufficient.