Fraud Bastard Guys

Don’t you hate those fraud bastard guys? You know the ones, the dudes and dudettes that rip off data and scam money from credit cards, bank accounts, etc. I’m not particularly worried about them, I think the most typical scam is using a credit card information and people are usually pretty protected from the banks. I think the worst ones I’ve heard about are the full-on identity theft where bank accounts are cleaned out and there isn’t any solid evidence of crime. Anyways, the reason I bring this up is because I was recently a pseudo-victim of fraud.

Several months ago there was a reasonably large news item with regards to the store “Winners” having their customer information hacked, and that they kept all sorts of credit card information on their servers. Apparently my credit card was one of the cards compromised. I found out about this last Friday when I was having problems accessing my card information online. I phoned the CC company and they asked me if I had recently got a new card. I said “no,” and then I was put on hold for a few minutes. I was then told about the Winners thing, that my card was flagged as being compromised, and that I was being issued a new card eventhough the card hadn’t been misused up until now.

When I first heard the story about Winners, it pissed me off not so much because of the fraud but because Winners had all of this information on file. Everyone was asking why a store would keep credit card information stored. The logical question that was asked was, “why doesn’t the government legislate that companies cannot keep credit card info on file?” Surprisingly, the government response wasn’t to restrict this behavior, but to legislate that if a company stores credit card information and if this information is compromised, then the company is legally required to report the compromise. Why Winners feels compelled to keep any information about me is beyond my comprehension. The other thing that pisses me off is why the hell I ever shopped at that POS store in the first place. I think I’ve only been there once, and come to think about it, they asked for my postal code at the checkout. Now why the hell would a store need my freakin’ postal code? I think I gave them a fake code. So now I have to go through all of my automatic withdrawal companies and tell them about my new card # (this includes phone, internet, gas, electricity, etc).

So here’s a big “up yours” to the fraud bastard guys, and another “up yours” to Winners, you bastard guy store.