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Thursday, December 07, 2017

The Saga Continues

This is sort of another moving post. I promised I had a lot to say about this and I wasn't lying. :-) I say sort of another moving post because while I believe it's directly related to the move, I can't prove it. Circumstantial evidence is strong, though.

On Wednesday, I used my credit card to pay the packers for loading our stuff into boxes. It was called in over the phone to the office. The move itself was paid for by check because the office was closed by the time the move was finished, but that ended up being a good thing because that following Monday, I received a phone call from my credit card company (Luckily, I left my phone working at my former house and luckily I happened to be at that house when the call came). They'd noticed several suspicious charges and wanted to know if I'd used my card at a department store.

Not just no, but hell no.

I get transferred to a representative. In India. He cancels my credit card, issues a new one, and says I will be emailed with what I need to do about the other 6 fraudulent charges on my card.

No email comes, and since he was difficult to understand, I thought perhaps he meant US Mail, but when Saturday came and went without a letter, I went back to my old house and used the phone. Yes, while all this is going on, I still have no phone or internet in my new home.

This time I get a woman in India who doesn't understand what I'm telling her until the fourth time I explained to her that my credit card number had been stolen. Then she tells me the first guy I talked to had done everything wrong aside from cancelling my old credit card, but that she couldn't help me. I needed to talk to the security department and they don't work on the weekends. I need to call back on Monday. She gives me their direct number.

I call the security department on Monday from my day job. The woman I speak with is in India. She doesn't understand what I'm telling her until the second time I explain that my credit card number was stolen. She works in the security department and this is her job! She didn't seem to take the situation very seriously or care very much.

I read off the six fraudulent charges with amounts and she says they'll come off my account. I'm not left with a very confident feeling about her handling of this problem.

A week later, only three of the charges have come off my account. I Google to find out how to talk to a representative in the United States. I find a number on their website for the security department that's different from the one I already had. I call that and I do get a US person.

Things went much more smoothly this time. She discovered that the woman in India only recorded five of the fraudulent charges even though I told her multiple times that there were six.

But after this phone call, everything was resolved. This experience did not leave me with the warm fuzzies for the credit card company in question. If they're going to outsource, they should train their people better. This was an ordeal that came at a super bad time and it was made more difficult by the lack of phone and internet.

My chief suspect in the theft of my credit card number? The moving company. The charges began the day after I gave them my number to pay for the packing and all the charges were in Georgia. Like I said, I can't prove anything, but it's pretty coincidental to believe it was someone else.