Reply #3: Yes.

[Wheezy]

Let me tell you, it is the biggest pain in the ass ever to cover all the bases. We don't know how they got our debit card numbers, but they got both mine and my husband's -- we did not lose the cards, we had them in our possession. And we did not have both the cards plugged on any same account, i.e. paypal or amazon or what have you.

Get this -- over $7500 worth -- our thief bought $2500 worth of textbooks, $1300 worth of *something* from an online card store, and made a $4000 tuition payment to an Ivy League school. Oh, and a $185 computer accessory. Interesting, no?

It's not just folks buying electronics and reselling them on E-bay.

There are many, many important steps you should be sure your dad takes. He should file a report with the FTC, close the affected account(s), make calls to other credit card companies where he has an account to alert them to keep a closer eye on his account because of fraud, contact one of the three credit bureaus to report fraud and put a 90 day fraud alert on his credit report (the one you call will alert the other two credit bureaus automatically), and file a police report, no matter how reluctant the police are to make a formal report (I've heard some departments won't or can't do it, but try).

You want to appear as proactive as possible and get paperwork to prove that it was fraud in case the SSN was somehow stolen too. A police report and a report with the FTC will help tremendously in the long run if the thief has managed to open up new credit cards using your dad's name.

(I'm so sorry. It's really horrible. I wouldn't wish this frustration and oogy feeling on anyone)

By the way, this did NOT happen through our online banking -- our actual checking account was not touched -- just the two debit card numbers that draw from the checking account were stolen (the actual checking account number is different from the debit card numbers, for anyone who is wondering.)


ON EDIT: We will be reimbursed by the bank, eventually, once the dispute charges are all settled. But this takes longer than I thought, and it's very time consuming -- not to mention some misinformation from the bank halted everything for a week before we discovered what the problem was.