I noticed a charge in my bank account for about $8. Then another one for about $12. I didn't recognize it, so I googled the "company" name, and the 800 number associated with it. I found a whole message board full of people that had these charges.

Somehow they got my debit card number from somewhere. No one on the message board ever got more than $50 taken from their accounts. I guess they assumed no one would notice eight bucks at a time. Eight bucks times a thousand people is a lot of money--they weren't too greedy--they will just take a little bit from everybody.

I had to sign an affidavit that those weren't my charges and the bank gave my money back. It was my debit card, not my husband's. On the message board, we could find no common thread--paypal, online purchases, whatever. I think these scum pay for ordinary thieves working in restaurants or whatever to "harvest" cc numbers, you know? I'll bet if you googled how to sell credit card numbers, you could find it.

I, too, put the fraud alert on my credit account. Some creditor grantors won't even consider your app if there's a fraud alert on it, so that can be hassle. We just decided not to apply for credit at all for that 90 days.

Karen