The credit card companies have really polished their act on the consumer side of the most conventional thefts.
Thanks to laws, no?
Well, I mean I was treated super courteously and the process was smoothly polished. (Presumably because this was such a pro forma theft.) We passed Obamacare, but I still get massively jerked around in the world of healthcare.
I'm so glad. My wife has a horrific story about a late 90s fight with Wells Far/go. It was all her fault that their database was breached. Somehow.
Did they explain why the one was authorised?
I assume it wasn't, and that's why it was so obviously flagged and declined. Probably there was some stray site (Paypal) that i use enough that they didn't need the expiration date.
Most of the charges were Match.com and Best Buy.
That's kind of sweet. Somebody wanted a date and a movie.
2: Depending how you want to count, mostly or completely. I mean, the fundamental underlying fact is the law that says credit card issuers are responsible for fraud*. Once you have that, they have very good incentive to work on the fraud prevention side. And then I'm pretty sure recent laws have pushed back on some specific things**. But I believe that, in between those things, there has been significant, possibly even competition-driven, improvement by the issuers on this sort of thing.
Come to think of it, my anecdotal impression is that this has been a trickle-down process: 20 years ago, AmEx was proactive and helpful and (for the most part) didn't try to screw over its customers. Now, that sort of thing is standard. Those first customers were profitable enough to justify treating them well, then the technology/procedures could (slowly) move downmarket.
*and retailers, under some circumstances
**I'm thinking around timeframes for resolution or something? I have no specific memories, but ISTM that, whereas you used to get into this whole mess of disputing purchases, during which time you didn't have your money, that just doesn't happen anymore (under normal circumstances; since fraud really does happen, the issuers must occasionally call bullshit on customers).
I had my cc company call me because someone had tried to spend $1,000 at threadless dot com. I couldn't imagine what someone would want to do with that many t-shirts.
The credit card theft ever happened to a friend's friend. On her 29th birthday, someone stole her cc number and used it to sign up for all the online dating sites out there, including a site called senior singles.
I couldn't imagine what someone would want to do with that many t-shirts.
I assume they were going to sell them, probably out of the back of a van.
Was there some sort of big fraud-y thing lately? The last couple of times I used a credit card, I was asked for ID. And then yesterday I got a new card in the mail to replace one that will not expire for several years.
13: Is it a chip-card? They're finally rolling those out, though they aren't chip-and-PIN. A lot of merchants in my area have new readers that also let you stick your card in through the front to read the chip. Usually it's not actually working yet, though.
That makes sense. I don't have the new card with me, but the old card lacks a chip.
I had two different cards stolen at two different restaurants in Toronto a couple years ago.
I've heard that the policies for debit cards aren't as generous, that they don't immediately give you your money back, and that if a fraudulent charge resulted in a fee because it made you overdraw the account with a legitimate charge, well, sucks for you.
Did they grab them off the table or what?
2: I think something like the equivalent to the credit card rules for healthcare would be a law that banned insurance companies from refusing to pay bills - giving them the ability to sue for refunds but not the ability to just say "no" and pass on the bill to the patients. And if Doctors didn't realize that they were providing something (e.g., facelifts) that the insurance plan didn't cover and tell the patient "no" then, well, they'd just be out the money. That would be hilarious and awesome, obviously, but it would be a pretty serious revision of how healthcare billing works now.
And then they brought them back along with a bill to pay for the privilege.
Once a waiter looked just too smarmy to believe, so I paid the bill in cash. But that was in NYC, where everyone expect to be robbed.
18- There should be an option when you sign the form that says you agree to pay for everything, that you only agree to do so if they notify you ahead of time whether something will be covered by your insurance. If they fail to notify you they agree to eat it or accept whatever insurance pays. We discussed that a few weeks ago when I had my finger done.
Or, as a start, how about they agree to tell you ahead of time what something will cost you if it isn't covered by insurance? Revolutionary, I know.
Do they have to give you your money back at all if it's your debit card?
From what little I know the difference between debit and credit cards is that when you use a credit card you're borrowing money from the bank and when you use a debit card you're just withdrawing money from your account. So if someone gets ahold of your credit card information and makes some fraudulent purchases it's analogous to a situation where I tried to put Moby's house up as collateral for a loan without telling him. I'm not saying the bank wouldn't try to repossess it, but I'm guessing the courts would be a bit skeptical about the whole thing given that the person who was granted the loan didn't own the house or live in the same state.
I keep a lawyer in the house for just such occasions.
21 - That form always makes me think I should invest in one of these just in case.
Of course, now I've got to update all these various auto-pay bills that go to that card, but I'll be ok.
Yes you do, says the man who canceled his lost credit card, mistakenly thought his health insurance payments were coming directly out of his bank account, got his family booted from their insurance, and only discovered his error when his daughter was on the verge of being hospitalized with a respiratory infection.
(Follow up: turns out Blue Shield jumped the gun on booting us by like three days, and are being investigated by CA's insurance commissioner. And I found my credit card. And Φ is ok.)
How about a spoiler alert next time.
Thanks to laws, no?
Credit cards only work because there is a high level trust in the system. If people were held liable for fraud, that trust would evaporate, people would be afraid to use their cards, and the credit card industry would implode. So, yeah, the law says people aren't liable for fraud, but that law is mostly a codification of the principal that makes the whole industry possible.
21: The hard part about that is that the price can go up; surgery costs more if you need more blood. They ought to be able to average it out and come up with a single price, but healthcare billing is not that sophisticated.
Healthcare billing is deliberately not that sophisticated.
Sophistry not sophistication , really. Or obscurantism.
What is the point of a chip card without a pin? The issuer gets to know that someone in an identifiable location is using one of their identifiable cards, but who knows who that person is?
Forget about it Jake, it's Americatown.
"In the U.S. market lost-and-stolen fraud is very small in comparison with counterfeit card fraud."
this kind of crap happens to us all the time. at least one of us in my house gets a new card every year.
but, worse than that, we've stopped using one of our cards because their fraud detection system was ridiculously aggressive and would trigger on things like: going to the same grocery store i always go to; buying something from iTunes (which i do all the fucking time); buying my wife some jewelry at a local jeweler's that i've gone to multiple times.
they'd immediately lock the card, and then, hours later, give me a robocall.
it happened once a month at least. and after a while it made every use of the card feel like a roll of the dice - would it trigger this time? will i be able to use it later today ?
22. My new ATM card* was stolen from my mailbox and it turns out that ATM cards are (at least BoA ones) also automatically and unchangeably debit cards. They noticed suspicious activity and called me, asking if I had made the charges. I said no, noted that I had not even been in the state that day, and they refunded all the transactions (which took a day or two) and sent me a new ATM card.
What I found more interesting (and maddening) is that the guy who stole the card was videotaped activating it at an ATM, videotaped buying lots of electronics from the Apple Store and Best Buy (to the tune of about $10k), had many, many priors on card theft, and so on. However the bank had no interest in prosecuting him.
In the end, about a year later, he was charged by the Feds on Social Security fraud, as he was "disabled" and "homeless" even though he was perfectly healthy and living with his wife in his home. He was apparently convicted but I have no idea if he ever did time.
* I was getting a new one because a week prior, BoA received a report of a possible compromise of my old card so they sent a new one, which I never received. My belief is the guy who ultimately stole the new one must have somehow** known that, gotten personal information and staked out my mailbox (which is not all that close to my house).
** Skimmed somewhere, is my theory, and the number sold on the DarkNet.
A bit of a nit -pick but an important distinction. What happened to HG isn't identity theft, which would have been much worse. ID is when someone has sufficient information about you to forge your identity and can then open accounts of various types and cause enormous problems. That's why I'm so pissed that OPM let all that very sensitive data (including mine) into the wild.
I was looking up "ATM skimmers" to see if that was still a thing (it is, and is getting more sophisticated, it seems), and the first search autocomplete was "ATM skimmers for sale".
Discover has a lock-at-will app on your phone, you can keep the card locked all the time, unlock it on your phone when you're going to make a purchase, then re-lock. I don't bother with it as I imagine most people don't but in theory it sounds reasonable, like a form of two-factor authentication.
||
Like most articles on this kind of topic most of the stories are depressing and a lot of these officers really, really should be fired and possibly prosecuted as well (but won't). Unlike some, though, it has some really amazing quotes from people involved:
Gaten also scoffed at the accusation that he tried to flee, bragging that he drove a souped-up Camaro, and if he wanted to outrun a "slow-ass police car," he would have done so.
"They were trained by the city attorney's office, who are experts in the law, to allow them to touch the [officers'] genitals," he says. "That is what the officers were trained to do. This has been a practice for many years."
Fuck Mike Freeman sideways with a service revolver:
"The price is paid not only by the prosecutors, but society, because this particular [suspect] got away with one," he said. "So I think it's very unfortunate for all of us."Or because, you know, the state brutalized a citizen for essentially no reason whatsoever.
No joke, I think DAs might really be the very first ones up against the wall.
The bit where a case gets thrown out of court because the officer involved literally made up stuff* on the application for a no-knock warrant is described as "a technicality" is a bit galling too.
*As in, we need it because so-and-so lives there and has a history of violence including being arrested for stabbing someone, when (1) the person wasn't so much 'arrested for stabbing' as 'the victim of a stabbing' and (2) didn't live there anyway.
I've had 4 or 5 instances of fraud on my credit cards in the last few years. I just opened a second account and use one card only for autopay stuffthat I would forget about renewing and another one for one-off transactions. It isn't fool proof but so far OK.
Healthcare gripe. I just switched to my employer's health plan which is very good. I work for a hospital.
Tim just got a letter in the mail about how his company is adding a high-deductible plan. In 2017 they are going to phase out the regular no deductible "ppo" - essentially an HMO that doesn't require insurance referrals.
They are claiming that this is because of the Cadillac tax. We need to control healthcare spending, but just making people pay more out of pocket is a shitty way to do it.
Cadillac tax: not to be implemented until 2018! They can plausibly claim to be preparing for it, though, even if it's more likely greed.
And yes, bad method (Vox on this the other day).
And guess what, the cow-orker next-door-but-one to me just now learned her cards were stolen and run up.
I just realized I may have left out one of the best bits from the link in 42. This may be the single most amazing "don't second guess me police work is dangerous" lines ever:
He allowed the massage to go on for so long for his own safety, he told the court. "I'm naked with oil all over me from getting a massage," he said. "You don't identify yourself or stop the situation because it's literally unsafe to do so, because you have no idea what weapons are in the room.
50.last: and for the safety of the community, which I hope you appreciate!
I have a high deductible plan where the employer puts the amount of the deductible in my HSA, so I'm in roughly the same boat as the people in the study (though their deductible is higher). Definitely I don't shop for care on price, as it's just be too difficult and frustrating to try to find costs out in advance. Like last week the specialist said B12 shots are going to work better than the sublingual tablets, and I guess that would have been a good time to try to find the price difference (which I bet is significant as each shot requires a nurse) and maybe argue for sticking with the tablets. But who am I supposed to talk about that with? The doctor won't know the cost that was negotiated with my partucular insurer. The insurance company won't know the pluses and minuses medically. So who do I talk to? And that's a real simple issue!
I do try to arrange my health care so that each year I either hit the deductible or don't use health care at all. So that study seems pretty intuitive to me.
And the hospital billing office, who probably has the prices, is specifically prohibited from disclosing prices negotiated with insurers. It's a mystery why the system doesn't work!
54
I once tried to suss out the price of a test the doctor recommended but I was on the fence about. I asked the NP, and she told me it was illegal for her to tell me the cost. It's a really fucking awesome system here. Price-comparison shop, but we don't really have set prices and we're not going to tell you what they are even if we do.
I learned one of the most common signs of possible credit card fraud is buying gas before buying electronics. I learned this from my bank a few moments after trying to buy a laptop after stopping to get gas on my way to the store.
Let's also take a second to reflect on how dumb health savings accounts, flexible savings accounts, et al. are. You might gamble on how much you will spend and possibly lose money to your employer or you buy spending you don't need. Or you have the account type that is basically yet another tax shelter for savings. Or some other set of options, because it is yet another way the health care system is too fucking complicated.
gamble on how much you will spend and possibly lose money to your employer or you buy spending you don't need
I find this so, so inexplicable. What on earth is the policy justification for setting up a system like this? What is the argument that making people guess how much they're going to spend on health care and lose the money if they guess too high is in any way a sensible thing?
(I think I've asked this before, but if anyone gave me an answer I understood, I've forgotten it.)
What's the big deal? You just figure out what procedures you'll need in the next year, go to the hospital to find out the cost of them, and set aside the appropriate amount of money up to 17 months in advance.
We blew way through ours this year between an ER visit, eye medication, and neurologist and therapist visits (spread across various family members)
To the extent it makes sense at all, I think it's for expected expenses, not unexpected ones - you know you have $50/month of prescriptions, you can put $600 in the FSA account. Still weird, still more useful for people in higher brackets, but not really guessing/gambling at that point.
FSAs are idiotic, but HSAs are totally reasonable. The money stays in the account from year-to-year, and when you hit medicare age it just becomes an ordinary retirement account. The only problem is that the bank administering it is charging more fees than they would in a good low-fee index, but partly you're paying for the liquidity.
60: That's how it's manageable, but what's the argument that losing extra money in the account is ever a good idea? I know how you're supposed to plan to keep it from happening, but what's the argument for designing it that way?
Who keeps the extra, employer or plan administrator? I've wondered if the latter because sometimes they're so unreasonable about approving reimbursements it seems like they have some other motive for denial.
I'm bracing for a fight with them on dependent care, we prepaid preschool tuition for the year because it was 10% discounted to do so. But that means for my Jan-June expenses all I have is a receipt from the previous August which I'm sure they'll deny. I'm going to get the school to make some fake receipts breaking the prorated payments down by month even though that's not when they were paid.
I think the intention, at least, was "if you could roll it over indefinitely it would just become an unjustified way for everyone to reduce their tax rate for some savings, so that ability should only be for people who actually live within HDHPs." Of course in practice that results in it being effective for its original purpose, except for a baseline level of predictable expenses (it's good for childcare).
But "you can get the money back out, you just have to pay taxes on it as if you'd never put it in the account" would solve the same problem just as effectively, without the bizarre penalty for being a bad guesser.
Yeah, good point - they just charge taxes as the penalty for early IRA distribution.
At a sport event, my kid just found five dollars.
If I'm reading CRS right, FSAs and HSAs weren't based on an idea from Congress - they're following rules the IRS issued in the 1980's, and never even finalized. Kicky.
At work we have a "privacy SWAT team" to get urgent reports of fraudulent activity acted upon. Of course, the vast majority of the stuff I see is people impersonating their aged parents because nobody ever got around to filling out a Power of Attorney. Dumbasses.
A cow orker at my old job had about $4,000 stolen out of his bank account one time. Apparently getting back actual cash was nightmarish in its complexity and duration.
42: All you need to know about the 3rd Precinct is 1. There was a tippling house literally across the street from the precinct house for almost a year, and the cops never did anything about it until someone got stabbed there and the neighbors complained; and 2. There's a "Wall of Honor" in the precinct house that has a photo of every MPD officer killed in the line of duty for the past 20 or 30 years, EXCEPT the lesbian cop who was shot by a suspect about 2 miles down the street.
71 is bad but I just can't get past "tippling house". Law and Order: Dickensian Crimes Unit.
71: Have you actually seen this firsthand? Because as I recall that dept has a lesbian chief whose partner is a sgt in the same dept and something like half the deputy chiefs and precinct commanders are gay or lesbian.
yeah, FSAs are great if you know you will spend at least $X on prescriptions every month. and they're handy for co-pays, too.
the last time we had to scramble to use up FSA money was back in the days when we had to turn in receipts for everything. now that it's all on debit cards, we have no trouble at all burning through the money. no matter how well i try to estimate ours, the money is always gone by late summer.
73: but you don't understand. There was a TIPPLING HOUSE. People were going to it every day. To TIPPLE. There was TIPPLING HAPPLING. Sorry, HAPPENING. It had PASSED THE TIPPLING POINT.
WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE TIPPLERS?
Not quite as good, but I was once involved in shutting down a strip club because prostitution was happening on the premises, which qualified it under NY law as a "disorderly house".
That makes me wonder what I missed when I skipped a showing of The Disorderly Orderly.
I was once involved in shutting down a strip club
"This is a bust!"
"Yes ma'am. It's quite impressive."
Hello Sir / Madam,
Do you need a credit/financial assistance ? for your business, mortgage, rent, personal loan, loan for a car or buy a house or even tuition fee for your child? If yes no more worries, We offer funding at a very low interest rate of 2.5%. All interested applicants are to contact us via email; jkim007042@gmail.com
Get back to us via email: jkim007042@gmail.com
Trimark Financial Services
Management
United States
Hello Sir / Madam,
Do you need a credit/financial assistance ? for your business, mortgage, rent, personal loan, loan for a car or buy a house or even tuition fee for your child? If yes no more worries, We offer funding at a very low interest rate of 2.5%. All interested applicants are to contact us via email; jkim007042@gmail.com
Get back to us via email: jkim007042@gmail.com
Trimark Financial Services
Management
United States ..
Hi Everyone, I would like to talk about something that I am just very excited about; I had a small restaurant and in my apartment I had a bad credit. It became very though for my family, because people do not want to loan; banks and other financial institution do not want to loan money to us due to bad credit. So I needed to find someone that was very lenient and also could pay really quick to us. We wanted to add on to our restaurant in other words we needed an $80,000 loan which was really difficult at that time. So a friend of mine 'Sarah William' said checkout: tenterdenfundsplc@yahoo.com or tenterdenfundsplc@outlook.com. I was like okay.. because I already lost $4,300 to scams, I didn't want to get scammed again. and she said' just email or call/ text: +18027369174, On a second thought i took the risk and applied for the loan. That day I got a response, luckily for me I got funded, I was overwhelmed and I couldn't believe how quick it was. I now own a home, my business has expanded and I have a decent credit. Anyways thank you guys at Tenterden Funding Plc. I couldn't have done it without you, thank you for saving us the hassle.