Fraud and Loathing in Ohio

Part of this week has been an adventure. Somehow, someone got my debit card number and promptly started to drain my account. My guess is that some company I’ve ordered from has gotten hacked.

Thankfully my bank is very good about this sort of thing and I had the money back in my account the next day, and the resulting overdraft fees dropped the day after that.

As a result, I am now over my heart attack (figurative, not literal). All I can say is that it’s not a happy thing to look at your account balance and see $20 there when there should have been significantly more than that, and I’m glad it’s all cleared up now.

However, the day that it took to clear everything up was special (not in the happy way), and it really took most of the whole day between calling my bank and the merchants who authorized the transactions, filling out the fraud paperwork, getting it notarized, fax it to my bank, etc.

On the upside, I found out that one of the local banks only charges $1 to notarize things for non-members, so that’s good to know for future reference.

To close, I would like to say the following things:

I love my bank. They are absolutely wonderful to work with and get things resolved insanely quickly.

Yahoo Voice was actually good about the whole thing and refunded the charge of their own volition without having to have papers filed.

Sony Online Entertainment, however, was absolutely horrible to work with. First off, their support line is long distance. You’d think that, with a company that size, they would have an 800 number. Then I had to spend almost half an hour trying to convince the rather inflexible person on the other end of the line that I did not, in fact, authorize the purchases, that I didn’t let anyone in the house do so, and that I don’t even *play* MMORPGs. She was actually trying to get me to say that I had done it myself after I told her that most certainly was not the case. Repeatedly.

Just how many times can you say “I am the sole cardholder and I didn’t authorize the bloody charge” anyway? After that, I was told that the only thing I could do is file fraud papers. This was after they determined it really *was* fraudulent because, looking at the account in question, the same person had used a number of different cards to pay for his purchases.

If that was all they were going to do, they could have told me that up front and saved me half an hour off of my plan.

Current mood: tired
Current music: Cowboy Bebop – Call Me Call Me