Pay attention to your bank accounts!

Pay attention to your bank accounts!

This is a public service message from Kat!!  I have a checking account that I don’t use much; it’s mostly for the payment of taxes. This morning I had reason to log on and I noticed there were two charges that looked unfamiliar. Neither had anything to do with tax bills. One was a paypal charge of around $500 and one was a purchase at Bergdorf Goodman of around $650.

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m not a Bergdorf shopper. In fact, I had to go to the website to see what they actually sold.  I found out they sell items from Prada, Jimmy Choo, Gucci and the like. I’ve never been one for purchasing name brands, or for spending a lot of money on an item. And that was true even when I was making that big corporate salary. When I looked this morning, I found out this store has boots that cost $4,000! Totally not a Kat product!

Anyway, what I can now say as someone who’s never been to Bergdorf is that their customer service is amazing, even if you’re not a customer. I called them at 8am this morning, and a real person picked up. Amazement number one. And then that person blew me away by actually listening to me, and investigating my concern. It winds up that someone used my debit/visa card and my name and address and ordered a backpack (please, like I’d ever spend $600 on a backpack). When it was ordered, it was going to be shipped to my house. But further investigation by the wonderfully helpful Bergdorf representative showed that someone then changed the delivery address. She wasn’t sure where it was being delivered to but thought we might have made it in time to stop it from reaching the final destination. She then reiterated what I was already thinking, which was to contact my bank and make sure they knew about the security breach.

So at 9am this morning I found myself at the bank, reporting two charges as fraudulent, and canceling my card. I’m glad I caught one purchase in time to hopefully stop it from reaching the perpetrator of this fraud. What concerns me is that if I hadn’t looked this morning, there could have been a lot more charges on my account than just two. And since this isn’t an account i use frequently, I would not have caught it for a while.

What this also tells me is that I (and anyone who is reading this) should make a point to check your accounts on a regular basis. This is true even for accounts you don’t use often. It’s apparently very easy for people to use your information for their own gain. Bums. Go make your own money!

So my message for this morning is:

Pay attention to your bank accounts!