If you used your debit card in a Target store in 2013, change your PIN number.
Target got hacked, and while you can dispute credit card charges, you take the loss on debit card fraud, so there’s no point in taking a chance.
It’s too bad we don’t have someone tasked with strengthening our system security to stop these kinds of attacks from happening. Maybe people should complain about it, since the government has stopped issuing checks and is forcing everyone to use debit cards.
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2 comments
Actually, no, you don’t take the loss on debit cards, otherwise nobody would ever use the things, *but* your bank account will be all sorts of messed up until the fraudulent charges are actually reversed and it might take a long time to get it all cleaned up what with bank overdraft charges yada yada yada. I know this because one of my friends was a victim of this hack, with his debit card, and he did get everything cleaned up in the end.
I don’t know about the government EBT cards though. Seems to me that since the government, not you, is the account owner there, it might actually be impossible to get fraudulent charges reversed. Grr. Just another way the banksters are ripping off people.
My thought: Making banks responsible for fraudulent transactions would be the first step. Right now, if there’s a fraudulent charge, they refund it back to you… but then they do a chargeback to the merchant, making the merchant eat the fraudulent charge. (Thus why a number of smaller merchants are starting to require photo ID despite that being explicitly against their cardholder agreement, they figure that at this point losing their POS terminal would cost them less than fraud). Make banks responsible for covering the cost of fraud, and you’ll immediately see a major improvement in the security of this entire EBT system. Bullshit talks, but when there’s money on the line, sh*t gets done.
The credit union I deal with had already alerted the people who were affected and froze their debit cards. The person I talked said they had dealt with the problem before and never wanted to go through that again because it was such a nightmare of paperwork and accounting. People would get annoyed, but not as annoyed as they were when they got ripped off.
I had to deal with a check fraud problem years ago, and it was a major PITA that took a couple of years to straighten out. It also shows up on your credit report, so the damage lasts at least 7 years, and it affects interest rates and deposits for utilities and apartments.