I just got a message that someone used my card to prepay ~1500 dollars at Budget car rental to prepay reservation. Of course I declined and filed for fraud and BoA is sending me a new card with a new number. My question was that I don’t even keep the card in my pocket, I use only Apple Pay to pay for the card that too mostly on Costco and haven’t used to pay anything online for quite some time. I wonder how would someone have hacked it. May be some online site which kept my card information got hacked?
Posted by spring20189
5 Comments
I’ve had many similar issues with my CCRs. They get hacked, I get charged for an international purpose, I report it as fraud, they send new ones, rinse and repeat.
Thieves have applications they use to randomly generate card number combinations and they run random card combos over and over until something approves. Although that would be a very tedious task to do manually, computers can try thousands of card number combinations in an hour with little human input. This can cause people who never used their card even once to have the card get compromised.
Also they can obtain it from data breaches at merchants where you’ve used your card in the past.
I had this happen with a BoA debit card that I had never used or taken outside. The checking account only exists to get Preferred Rewards and to cash out my cc rewards, I don’t use it otherwise. Luckily BoA immediately auto flagged the charges as fraud and refunded me even though the amounts weren’t that big, under $100. But as to how it even happened in the first place is still quite a mystery to me.
Since you only use the card with Apple Pay, lock the physical card in the app. This will allow you to continue using it in Apple Pay but will block all other transactions. Bank of America is one of a handful of banks that allows this kind of split (Chase, Apple, and FNBO are examples that do as well).