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Happy Money Monday!

Today I am bringing up an unfortunate topic. It’s extremely critical to always check your financial statements, such as bank accounts and credit cards for suspicious charges. Often, these charges are small “test” charges at first, which can get around built-in fraud detection from your financial institution. The criminals performing the transactions are hoping that you don’t notice the small amounts and then can eventually perform much larger transactions.

Many of these attacks begin with a skimming, such as at a gas station pump or Point of Sale system at a vendor. Others, an unsecure or compromised checkout screen on a website. The exact point where payment details are compromised is difficult to determine.

Using digital wallets and burner cards everywhere you can help prevent these attacks from occurring. However, if you check your statements, such as every month when you pay your bills, you can catch the problems that sneak through before they grow exponentially worse and then can report it to your financial institution.

This month, I ended up discovering some fraudulent charges on one of my credit cards. I use this card for quarterlies (a topic for another day) so the charges were easy to spot as they were unexpected, and I saw them when I coincidentally opened the mobile app to check on the card for other reasons, but had I not done so, I would still have seen them when checking my statements when it was time to pay bills. The charges were small, subscription charges under ten dollars for a food delivery service in another continent (and even had foreign transaction fees). Immediately as soon as I saw them, I called the fraud line for the credit card and disputed the charges. The credit card issuer locked my credit card, gave a credit for each of the charges, issued me a new account number and mailed out a new card.

Credit issuers are required to give 60 days from the financial statement containing the fraudulent activities or other errors for you to report it, and then they have 30 days to investigate. Basically, it’s critical to stay vigilant and watch your finances, don’t just pay whatever bills come your way, and don’t let things happen to you. Take steps to prevent fraud from occurring, and if it occurs anyway, don’t push off dealing with the problems either.