Two Cheers

Having forgotten--or never knowing--that I had signed up for text fraud alerts, I was a little taken aback by a message received today from Chase Bank. Actually, I wasn't sure that it was from the bank, so I followed protocol by calling the 1-800 number on the paper statement that I receive every month.

By the way, that's another reason for relying on dead-tree communications: it's easy to make a fraudulent message or website look legitimate, but a printed missive is much harder to fake. Paper quality, typeface, grammar, typographical errors, and logos all have to pass the eyeball and touch tests.

The Chase customer service rep confirmed that someone had tried to use our Visa card with an online merchant but was turned down because the $1,249.61 purchase looked suspicious. A quick check of our wallets showed that we still had our cards, so our number could have been skimmed from any number of sources, e.g, restaurants, movie theaters, stores, or other online vendors. The new cards will be sent shortly in the mail.

Everyone's uncomfortable about how governments and companies track what private citizens are doing, but in this case I'm happy that the bank understands our normal behavior well enough to know when a transaction should be investigated. Here's hoping that the technology is sophisticated enough to nail the bad guys as well. For now, two cheers for big data.

[Update - 1/15/15: in related local news

Menlo Park police arrested Menalto Cleaners owner Edwin Gary Smith on Wednesday in connection with a large-scale credit card fraud. Smith, 63, was served with an arrest warrant that alleges 40 felony counts including identity theft, credit card fraud and elder fiduciary abuse.....Menalto Cleaners defrauded 38 clients out of a total of $678,000 between December 2011 and October 2014 by overcharging their credit cards, police said.]