That’s not ID theft.
Your card was compromised by someone you handed it to, like at a restaurant.
More and more merchants are asking for the 3 digit number on the back of your card and the only way they get that is by swiping your card into a capture machine, writing the numbers down on the front of the card or just taking the receipt. but, they would have looked at your 3 digit commonly called a “CVD”, “CVV”, etc.
Your bank will issue a new card, cover the fraud charges and all will be well.
I know (or I hope) it’s not “ID theft”, it just fit the title better. That’s all I need, my precious SoSecurity number wandering alone in the cement jungle out there, to be intercepted by some illegal Kenyan on his way to the U.S. Presidency! And anyway, every tragic misadventure deserves a fitting pun, or what use would it be?!
Events such as this take away something from your confidence that you’re smarter than the rest, that you’ve learned your lesson, can’t ever happen to you, etc. It just did, buster!
I have now run three scans of the machine. All came out completely clean, unusual (suspicious?), no signs of even harmless trash spyware. Still, I want to figure out what happened. Right now I’m leaning 70:30 that it happened (that is assuming it did not happen via a mole at the credit card company, as suggested above), not through my puter, but through a live local merchant, probably a gas station. Which leads to a lesson to use separate credit cards for separate purposes.
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