Don’t use a debit card for purchases; it’s a direct gateway to all of your accounts, and you could be financially wiped out. Use a debit card ONLY when you withdraw cash at a bank’s office, with a teller.
Use a simple credit card, which doesn’t allow access to your checking and saving and investment accounts.
My Wells Fargo CC has been hacked 5x since I got it in 2018, and the bank/ CC company have refuted all the charges and credited my account, plus issued a new card each time. It’s been almost 18mos since last hack, and with all financial usernames/passwords changed, so far, so good.
The only time I have been compromised was using a debit card to take money out of a atm. That set off an adventure of my account being target and numbers sold off. Never, ever use your debit card.
> Don’t use a debit card for purchases <
I agree. My bank forces me to have one. So I set its limit at one dollar.
> Use a simple credit card, which doesn’t allow access to your checking and saving and investment accounts. <
Also good advice.
Agree. We don’t use debit cards for much. Maybe more than we should even then
“Don’t use a debit card for purchases;”
I was in my bank for a rare visit and the teller noticed I had a high balance while money passing through and heading somewhere else. She said, Don’t use your debit card while you have that high balance. I said, “THAT’S why I don’t have a debit card.
I have never missed not having one.
Mom, I fell very sorry for you. I had a secretary about 30 years ago who had her identity stolen and it made her life pure hell for a long time trying to straighten it out. I hope you are going to have the same problems.
E. Pluribus Unum suggested immediately freezing your credit at all three credit bureaus. I second that. You should do that RIGHT NOW.
Carriage Hill gave solid advice, too. Never ever pay with an ATM card — it’s a direct link to your bank account.
I had a LOT of credit auto-pays set up (about 40) and our cc was stolen. I got a new card and had to update all the auto-pay accounts. It took about a day and a half to fix all that.
Less than a year later, the new cc number was stolen again and another day and a half wasted fixing all the auto-pays for another card number.
I researched solutions and found both Visa and Capital One offer what is called a “virtual credit card.” I chose a Capital One MasterCard because of much better features and superior ease of use.
You get a master cc number and the bank provides you with a physical card with that number. You can keep that card in your wallet for use in stores. Now here is the slick part. Under that master card, you can create subsidiary virtual cards that only exist as data, not a physical card. You can create any number of virtual cards. All payments made on the virtual card roll up to your master card number and you only get one statement for the master account. The statement does not even show that a virtual card was used.
You NEVER use that main account credit card number for any online transaction. For every new merchant you pay online, you create a new virtual credit card number. It only takes a few seconds to create the new virtual card. You can do it in their mobile app or on the web.
The virtual cards have special features: 1. they can be used only at one specific merchant; 2. you can set them for one-time use; 3. you can set an expiration date; and 4. you can turn off the card and turn it back on when you need it.
Here’s the sweet part. If a virtual card number gets stolen, it’s really of no use to anybody since it’s tied to a single merchant. But it only takes seconds to make a new virtual card number. If your master cc gets stolen (which happened to us), Capital One issues you a new master physical card AND all of the virtual cards you created get moved to that new master physical card.
It is a really sweet system and it isn’t widely known. I HIGHLY recommend it.
Oh, one other nice thing. If you call Capital One for support, you get a HUMAN being, not a useless and obnoxious AI bot AND you get an American who speaks AMERICAN English! Their support is top-notch!
All credit cards allow you to set up transaction alerts for transactions above $X. I set X to zero and get a text message for every transaction. I usually get the text message for the transaction a couple of seconds after tapping my card at a POS terminal.
Hats off to Wells Fargo for our banking, too. I’ve gotten several calls and text messages from them asking if a particular transaction was really authorized by me. Their fraud-detection algorithms have gotten a lot better.
Good luck, Mom!
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Better yet, don't get a debit card at all. I have an ATM card that only works with an ATM machine and you need to have the physical card. And it works all over the country with no withdrawal fee, which is really handy when traveling. If you're withdrawing money at the teller window you don't use a debit card, you just tell the teller how much money you want.
I look at my CC account on line daily and have caught unauthorized charges several times. It is a pain in the but because it akes 2-3 weeks to get a new card. I have caught all the bad charges while they were still in “pending” and have been assured that those charges were never paid in the first place. Once I found 7 charges at gas stations from Bakersfield to LA. I called on them the same day they were made and posted to pending.
Agree