TexasCHLforum.com

When Mrs Anygun and I returned from California in 2003 my mother moved back in with my younger sister. She had three rent homes from a previous divorce settlement. Long story short, over a 2 year period my sister ran up over $35,000.00 on my mother's credit cards to repair the houses. She opened multiple cards up in mom's name and transferred balances. When I found out I brought Mom back to live with us. I hired an attorney and we worked mom through bankruptcy court. By the time it was settled, the total in principle and interest totaled over $55,000.00.

I brought the problem up to the city PD and county sheriff. I contacted the DA. None of them would touch it. Undoubtedly some of it was mom's fault, and this can be an issue when folks get old. Mom had given my sister over $50,000.00 from the sale of her house in addition to all of the credit card stuff.

My anger drove me to the point where I seriously considered doing things I cannot really discuss. Mrs Anygun and my close friends helped me through it along with my faith in Christ and forgiveness. Mom died in 2011. I have not seen my sister since the funeral. It has affected my relationship with my brother and other sister. They did not lift a finger to help. Mrs Anygun and I handled it all. You can't choose your family.

I have no tolerance for this type of criminal and the fact that it is so easily overlooked just adds more to my belief that we are on an unstoppable downward spiral. Families should not tolerate this behavior and ignore it.

KC5AV wrote: Dave's point is that you're never going to get rich on the cash back and frequent flyer miles. He has a net worth of about $55 million, so I'm not going to argue the point.

Dave is also pretty frugal. I don't get a credit card unless I'm going to make at least $500 on the deal. Airline miles can be sold off fairly easily... I don't think Dave would turn up his head at $500.

It's tax time. I need to pay my property taxes. I can pay them with credit card, in exchange for a 3% surcharge. So it's simply a matter of what CC deal nets me significantly more than that 3% surcharge.... The taxes will meet the typical minimum spending requirements, which is why I'm considering it. FYI - it's worth between 2 and 4 round trip airline tickets, depending on how it gets sliced. Those will sell for between $500-$1000. In terms of $ per hour, it's a fair amount of money.

In terms of CC fraud, it's tough to get anyone to care. It's the merchant that is typically out the money and they wouldn't (always) be out the money if they had done simple ID verification...

ELB wrote:=We did have to change our card twice in two weeks once because the first one was used in France, and the replacement was used in Italy (interestingly the company told us the thieves used physical cards, not just the number).

If I recall correctly from a class my local police did, thieves take blank gift cards (easy to steal from a cash register) and load stolen credit card information onto them. Viola -- they have a physical card, and since it looks like a gift card no one asks for ID or checks anything (not that they do anyway, even if you write "PLEASE ASK FOR ID" on the card itself... but I digress).

FYI - Just got billed for a point of sale withdraw in TN. This is on a debit card, not used online, that was reissued in 8/2014...
IT does have an RFID chip.

The frustrating thing is that my bank can't give me a transaction ID to give to walmart to identify the particular charge... Which could be used to identify where it took place (Walmart has cameras, right) and who did it...

I guess the banks don't care as they get the money back from the vendor.

Some people can't handle guns responsibly but that's no reason for me to stop using them. The same for credit cards.

So I called my bank, refuted the charges and cancelled the card.
My bank was unable to give me any more information (such as a transaction ID) that I could use beyond a location and an amount. As all of these transactions have IDs at the processor, this was disappointing.


Over the next two days, I made 5 calls to the Walmart where the card was used. I'm not out any money, my bank isn't out any money, but Walmart is. And Walmart would be able to identify the register and probably has a camera pointed at the bad guy.

4 calls - no one was there who could take the report. 5th call, I was told to call my bank and dispute it (yes, I know that). I was told to file a local police report (I'll do that if it helps Walmart, but otherwise I'm not wasting my time).

It took a good 10 minutes talking to a "manager" indicating that I wanted to make Walmart aware of it so that they could investigate through loss prevention. They finally took my number, but didn't sound too interested... IMHO, a police report should be filed on their end...

That's why this stuff continues to be a crime...

After the Target fiasco my Discover card was hacked. Here is how they did it. They used my card number, had enough personal info and called Discover card, sweet talked them into adding them onto the account, sending a card to them at a California address, changing the emai address of the account, etc. Discover card sends me a text message to confirm these changes and when I get online and I see that all of these changes have been made I throw a fit. Had to make a police report (does nothing), contact all the credit agencies, get new credit cards and change all the changes on line. If you do not have a password to give them for telephone call in be aware that a sweet talker may hack your credit cards too. You think that you only need a password for online stuff but you need one for telephone stuff too.

My investment firm has strict security policy.

There is a 7 day window before certain account changes (ie: address, phone, etc). During this period a letter is sent to the address of record, asking for confirmation of the change.

For extra protection it also makes available 2 factor authentication. The option for 2 factor authentication is every log on, or just log ons from unfamiliar computers. The code expires in 10 minutes.

Check with your bank and see what security options are available.