Credit Where Due


What are the odds? Someone copped my credit card number for the second time and charged a bunch of crap online.

My credit card company caught the fraud immediately and called. All’s handled on this end, but having been through this before, I know the culprit probably won’t be apprehended because it’s not within the bank’s best financial interest to pursue incidents under a certain amount of money. I want to say somewhere around the $10,000 mark, but I could be making that up.

Anyway, I know exactly where the card was compromised because I hadn’t used it for weeks until yesterday at lunch, and since all the shady charges popped up yesterday afternoon after lunch, it’s not tough to pinpoint the scene of the crime.

Being the good citizen I like to think I am, I called the restaurant. I just assumed management would want to know what had gone down so they could investigate and then presumably prevent it from happening again. But oddly enough, instead of being met with sheer gratitude by the manager in charge, I got a fair share of attitude. Even though I made it very clear I wasn’t placing blame on any one person in particular – and emphasized I did not suspect it was our actual waiter – the manager felt compelled to suggest criminals in Mexico could have randomly generated my credit card number because that’s what had happened to him once.

That’s the moment I waved the white flag and called it a night.

3 thoughts on “Credit Where Due”

  1. ok, what’s the name of the restaurant so i can avoid going there? what city? i can try to avoid the whole city if it has happened to you two times!!

    i had my paypal robbed once by someone from toronto to use in a sex meet up site. but paypal reimbursed me, and it was only 90 bucks or so. probably a talented 15 year old horny kid.

  2. Last time was in NYC a few years back. I cut up an old card when I got my new one in the mail, but someone allegedly put the pieces back together and made a whole new card from the mold. He then went on a slight spree around town, charging things like liquor and cartons of cigarettes. There were also about 40 suspicious charges at a deli in my neighborhood. Who spends more than $1000 at a deli in 2 days? In small increments?

    The cc company took care of reimbursing my account, but I’ve been super-vigilant ever since – making sure to shred everything into itty bitty little pieces. Now this week’s breach was a whole new genre of theft for me.

    Good times. Good times.

  3. we are all vulnerable, i suppose, when we hand over our credit cards to restaurants, hotels, gas stations, wherever. it’s almost amazing when someone isn’t ripping you off nowadays. One of the legacies of Bush is that stealing/theft/deception are all ok as long as we are the ones doing it. like that stupid new fox show where people take lie detector tests, moment of truth i think it’s called, and then they have to tell the truth to win money, in the process destroying their relationships, jobs, lives, you name it. and clapping all the while. but the point is, if there is a point, is that lying is the new truth, in the post bush “WMD, nuke threat, yada yada yada” era” where profits are the be all end all and most of us are just getting screwed.

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