I have a call about card fraud at least twice a year. Sometimes it’s legit (attempted) fraud, and other times it was my own purchase they just found unusual. Happens to my US cards as often as my Taiwanese cards.
Sometimes the calls about card fraud are the actual fraud attempts. I don’t know if there’s any specific crime wave right now, but this seems to be a constant in the world we live in now.
Got an SMS yesterday from Citibank saying “To ensure the safety of your Credit Card, we would like to replace your card with a new one…”…and they requested me to call their Help Desk. So I called today and they said one of my cards has apparently been used in some suspicious transaction and they cancelled it…I hardly use that card except for a few online transactions once or twice a year and filling gas in the Self Service stations. Anyway, they agreed to send me a new card via registered post and I should receive it within a week.
I just tried to use my Huanan credit card at TMUH and the machine threw up an error message saying the transaction had been declined by the bank. I assumed it had been automatically flagged for some reason, although there shouldn’t have been anything suspicious about it because I’ve used it there many times before.
Shortly after I received an SMS from Huanan saying I needed to call them. I figured it would be about that transaction of course, but the guy told me first that I’d gone over the limit (definitely not — I just have like 9k on there, if that), then that there had been an attempted transaction for 126k yesterday from some random company I’d never heard of, which had been tagged as fraudulent and declined.
So that card has apparently been canceled and the fraud department will call me tomorrow or the next day so I can get a new one issued.
For the people who’ve encountered this in Taiwan before, I would expect this to be a simple affair where the only annoyance will be having to go to the bank/post office to collect the new card… or is that me being optimistic?
I’m guessing it’ll at least need a visit to the branch for me. I had to do that for the original card anyway.
I might even have needed to go to the post office first to collect the letter telling me to go to the branch to collect the card (I have to do that for all registered mail, whether because that’s the norm, because my postman is lazy and doesn’t want to deal with collecting people’s signatures, or because I’m sleeping when he comes and/or don’t understand what he’s shouting from the street below ).