Jaren and I have had one of those really, REALLY, REALLY crappy things happen to you that you never want to experience. Our bank account had some serious fraudulent activity that I caught a couple of nights ago. By that point the offenders had 2 full days to drain our account without our knowledge. I won't give specifics on how much was taken but I will say that it included all of the money we had been saving up for our house over the last 7 months and was quite a lot.
This is a bizarre situation because I found out that they used MY information (including my maiden name) to create a profile for our online banking. They even listed an e-mail address with my married name! Apparently you can have more than one profile (we already had one under Jaren's SSN). Chase Bank informed us that the profile in question was created on May 4th only one short week after our return from our Georgia trip. When we were heading back to the airport we had stopped at one Chase branch in Atlanta to get a cashier's check for the Escrow account. Coincidentally enough, these people live in Atlanta and even used the ATM twice at another Chase location just a short distance from the one I went to.
They waited and watched our account until they finally added an address onto the account (online) and requested a new debit card to be mailed there on the 21st of May. The new card was activated on the 29th. They waited until we got paid on the 1st to start draining the account. I only realized when I saw the transactions online. These people had access in all forms to our account including online transactions, phone banking transactions, ATM withdrawals (which require a PIN), a debit card transaction and two transactions processed in person with a teller that require ID. They were even able to forge my signature pretty well. How they managed all this is beyond me. It only makes sense to me and Jaren that only someone who works at the bank and can pull up all of my information would be able to accomplish this and know the procedures well. I don't think they are professionals because they did not remove the address or phone numbers they listed from the account and they used ATMs which would have video footage of them.
Now we are going through the steps to recover the funds and protect our other accounts. We have filed a police report and have put alerts on our credit reports. Maybe it's not necessarily the fault of Chase Bank, but I think it's about time we transferred all of our accounts some place else...that I trust more.
Hopefully this doesn't happen to any of you. I have NO idea how they got my information when we didn't spend any time in Atlanta except going to and from the airport and going to the Chase branch. The police officer I talked to today gave me a couple of generic pointers for future reference in protecting ourselves from identity theft and I added one I know of from my time working at a bank/credit union.
- Be careful when making hotel reservations. They will ask for a credit/debit card number to make the reservation and will sometimes assign the reservation a name or password being your maiden name. An employee could take this information (not that you can really prevent that).
- The most common cause of bank fraud the police come across here is when you throw away an old checkbook with account information in it (even with no checks there are still the deposit slips in the back with the routing # and account#). These should be shredded.
-You can request specific things on your account such as verbal passwords for completing transactions over the phone, at the drive-through or in person (as well as identification for the last two)
Just some food for thought. I'll keep you posted on if and when these suckers get caught. Let's hope the bank is good about reimbursing the funds during the claim so I can pay this month's rent, tithing, utilities, buy groceries, etc.
This is a bizarre situation because I found out that they used MY information (including my maiden name) to create a profile for our online banking. They even listed an e-mail address with my married name! Apparently you can have more than one profile (we already had one under Jaren's SSN). Chase Bank informed us that the profile in question was created on May 4th only one short week after our return from our Georgia trip. When we were heading back to the airport we had stopped at one Chase branch in Atlanta to get a cashier's check for the Escrow account. Coincidentally enough, these people live in Atlanta and even used the ATM twice at another Chase location just a short distance from the one I went to.
They waited and watched our account until they finally added an address onto the account (online) and requested a new debit card to be mailed there on the 21st of May. The new card was activated on the 29th. They waited until we got paid on the 1st to start draining the account. I only realized when I saw the transactions online. These people had access in all forms to our account including online transactions, phone banking transactions, ATM withdrawals (which require a PIN), a debit card transaction and two transactions processed in person with a teller that require ID. They were even able to forge my signature pretty well. How they managed all this is beyond me. It only makes sense to me and Jaren that only someone who works at the bank and can pull up all of my information would be able to accomplish this and know the procedures well. I don't think they are professionals because they did not remove the address or phone numbers they listed from the account and they used ATMs which would have video footage of them.
Now we are going through the steps to recover the funds and protect our other accounts. We have filed a police report and have put alerts on our credit reports. Maybe it's not necessarily the fault of Chase Bank, but I think it's about time we transferred all of our accounts some place else...that I trust more.
Hopefully this doesn't happen to any of you. I have NO idea how they got my information when we didn't spend any time in Atlanta except going to and from the airport and going to the Chase branch. The police officer I talked to today gave me a couple of generic pointers for future reference in protecting ourselves from identity theft and I added one I know of from my time working at a bank/credit union.
- Be careful when making hotel reservations. They will ask for a credit/debit card number to make the reservation and will sometimes assign the reservation a name or password being your maiden name. An employee could take this information (not that you can really prevent that).
- The most common cause of bank fraud the police come across here is when you throw away an old checkbook with account information in it (even with no checks there are still the deposit slips in the back with the routing # and account#). These should be shredded.
-You can request specific things on your account such as verbal passwords for completing transactions over the phone, at the drive-through or in person (as well as identification for the last two)
Just some food for thought. I'll keep you posted on if and when these suckers get caught. Let's hope the bank is good about reimbursing the funds during the claim so I can pay this month's rent, tithing, utilities, buy groceries, etc.
1 comment:
Ouch!!! I'm so sorry. That is AWFUL!!!
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