The New Hotness

OK, this was different.

A flurry of alerts informed us about charges on an “inactive” credit card account: someone started using my card from a joint account with Mary. Our two cards have different numbers and security codes, although they produce charges to the same account.

The account was inactive for a simple reason: I’d never taken my card out of its mailer and never bought anything with that number. It was activated when Mary turned on her card, although it still carries that sticker:

The customer service agent discovered Amazon had already issued a refund, so apparently the transaction tripped their fraud monitors.

He canceled that number and I’ll get another card, which I intend to continue not using, in a few days.

What I do not understand: how did my card number and security code end up in play, given that I never used it? AFAICT, the only two places that number appears are on the card and in the issuer’s database.

Do you know how such things work?

A casual web search for the (now invalidated) credit card number produces no hits. The simplest explanation: search engines don’t return results for sixteen digits resembling a credit card number.

Verily: just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get ya!