Account theft, How could this happen?
I received an email this morning from my bank notifying me of suspicious activity on my debit card and they gave me the last four digits of the debit card.
I recognized the debit card in question as one that I keep in my home safe because I never use it. I also keep with this card the accompanying letter from the bank announcing my bank assigned pin number for this debit card.
After retrieving this from my safe I called the customer service 800 # on the back of the card and told them of the notice I received via email about suspicious activity against the card. They looked up my account and said "Yes, during the course of two hours there had been one attempt to use my debit card account at an ATM machine which was denied and
four successful additional charges at food and small retail stores where they made small purchases and then requested additional cash back during the purchase. All purchases except for the ATM transaction were successful.
The customer service rep asked me if I had any idea how they could have gotten my debit card and PIN number. I told the rep this debit card has spent its entire short history in my home safe, that only I have access to, and that this card has never ever been used in any way. The rep said "yes, I can see that on my screen that it has never been used prior to today". So I told the rep that there is no way anyone could have gotten that information due to negligence on my part. The rep then told me that all of these were face-to-face transactions meaning that the thief had to have both the debit card and the pin number in order to make these transactions work. My question to her was "how can this be possible with a card and bank assigned pin number sitting in my safe during the entire span of its existence? She said she did not know.
I am one who is very aware of identity theft thus very careful with protecting my personal and banking ID and can't for the life of me understand how anyone could have gotten their hands on a copy of my card and the knowledge of my PIN # with both of these items sitting safely and unused in my home safe.
When this account was opened I only received one debit card which is all I need. So how in the world could there be a second card floating around out there for someone to use. The only thing I can think of is this:
The only entity that could produce a second card who would also know my bank created PIN # would be the bank itself. Therefore it's my suspicion that this theft is an inside job by one of the bank employees.
I'm wondering if anyone can shed some light on this.
Thanks
