We had a fraudulent charge placed on our debit card from our local credit union for about $700 at Lowe's in our town, and then two days later another fraudulent charge placed on our Chase credit card for almost $1000 at the same Lowe's. These were in mid-December. I called both of them right away and got the charges reversed.
Now all of a sudden both of them have shown up again on both accounts-- our credit union checking account and our Chase credit card. Both of them were placed back onto the accounts on the same exact day, February 23, over two months since the fraud happened.
We had also reported these to the police, since the cards were used in our home town and at a store we routinely spend tens of thousands at (being a general contractor business). We figured it had to be someone we somehow knew or they knew us well enough to take a guess that shopping at "our" store would fly under the radar. The police were able to get footage from Lowe's from the exact cash register used, showing a man and a woman (not us) purchasing a whole host of bizarre items from toilet paper to Sephora gift cards to a doorbell with a video on it (the nerve of a thief to want to make sure THEY don't get robbbed...). The order had been placed via the phone by someone claiming to be my husband, who most certainly was not. They actually even stated the name wrong on the card, saying "Fred" instead of "Frank"! (BTW Lowe's does take phone orders very routinely; many times customers will place materials on their personal cards, so the contractor has the materials rang up at the counter and the customer is called right there.)
Turns out these people are somehow connected to an employee's wife's friends and it's a ring of about a dozen people who commit identity fraud like this. The last we heard from the detective they don't quite have all the information together to actually make any arrests. But I digress...
I've had the odd fraudulent charge here and there on my card and the routine is the same: call in the charge, verify you didn't make it, they credit back your account and send a new card. I've never had it put back on my account two months later. And even stranger is that both the credit union and the bank have done this, and did so on the same day.
Why would this be happening? I can't get answers right now as I'm out of the country and my waking hours are not the same as their banking hours. I'm waiting to get an hours that they overlap, but in the meantime it's killing me. I'm worried that they think we actually did make these purchases, which is baffling because of all the police evidence they have.
Submitted February 26, 2018 at 05:31AM by LeopardTwins http://ift.tt/2F87y08
