So this weekend my wife checked our bank account and found we had $2000 worth of charges from Stamps.com that we did not make. Two years ago she signed up for their service for some shipping but found it cheaper to use the Post Office. Well sometime Friday night someone got into her account (using an old password she hasn't used in years) and ordered $2000 worth of labels in increasing amounts. First $30, then $110 then $300 and so on and so on. Since stamps.com doesn't have any after hours support or anyone on site with the holiday yesterday, they claim there is nothing they can do and all the labels/postage have been printed.
We called our bank, disputed the charges, had the card replaced and now we have to wait up to 10 days to get the $2000 back to our account.
While on the phone the rep lectured my wife about proper password safety and actually said "If you watched the news you'd know this is a problem". Wifey says it sounds like the rep was reading from a script so this is likely not an isolated issue. While doing some quick googling this weekend we found more than a few people reporting the same issue this week. Seems like this was a coordinated effort to coincide with the holiday to limit people's ability to fight it.
So, learn from our mistakes.
1) Never reuse passwords. Ever. The last few months we have been diligent about this, but we created this account a few years ago and forgotten about it.
2) Don't use your debit card for online purchases. Use a credit card because while you fight unauthorized charges you're not eating ramen for 4 days while you sort it out.
3) Do research on businesses before working with them. Stamps.com has a less than stellar reputation for being proactive about dealing with fraud.
Submitted February 19, 2019 at 11:46AM by WarbossTodd http://bit.ly/2NfMsyz
