Harriet, apparently these hackers can make fake cards. Our card was not stolen, it is still right here on dh's dresser.
The bank lady said thieves can steal numbers, generate random numbers, all kinds of things, and then make their own cards.
They will try a small amount ($1, apparently in our case) and if that goes through, then they try for more. I think they had two more transactions, $35 and $100, before the fraud alert system highlighted it, probably b/c it was out of our normal area of use.
I am sooo thankful for that!
I told dh, if I had LOST a hundred dollar bill, I'd feel terrible, but I am not going to worry about this, b/c there was absolutely nothing we could have done about this. We never use our debit cards online, and we never use them in restaurants where the people take them out of our sight.
Dmom says we ALL need to sign up for LifeLock... but right now, dh and I can't add ANY monthly expenses. He is pretty stressed out about it all, but we're just hoping the bank can recover the money.
We also think maybe they used dh's number b/c somehow they knew it wasn't often used.
I don't know if that is even possible. But I'd say 99.99% of the time, we use mine, so it would have been easily noticed. It's only on rare occasions that dh uses his. Of course, that also may have made it more obvious to the fraud alert system. Who knows?
It would have been awfully nice to have spent this weekend in Orlando with my money & Mickey Mouse... instead of here with all this stress and chaos...