I’ve finally become a victim of the “Identity Theft” problem we hear so much about. Thankfully, my self-identity remains in my possession and only my credit card number has been compromised.
The thief made out with two months of AOL service and something from eBay (probably a gift certificate, that’s the only thing I can think of that eBay actually sells). One might question the cognitive abilities of someone who steals a credit card number and rushes out to buy AOL access, but I think this was actually an intentional decoy. Strange AOL charges lead people to suspect… AOL, not a credit card thief. Indeed my first reaction to seeing the AOL charge was to blame AOL, even though I’ve never signed up or given them my credit card number. This threw me off the scent for a good two hours before I discovered the other unauthorized charge. I suspect the thief used AOL’s signup form to test random numbers until one of them worked.
In any case, my experience was fairly painless. I called the credit card company and got connected to India without wait, and they quickly resolved the problem. My only complaint is that the second time I called (when I realized that this was not an AOL scam but actual fraud) the customer service representative tried to sell me fraud protection before transferring me to someone who could actually reissue the card. I was certainly not in the mood for a sales pitch.