Stealing Your Identity

Back in the spring, UPMC grudgingly announced that "a few dozen" of its employees were the object of identity theft by person or persons unknown, hacking into the health care giant's computers.  Then the number grew, to 300.  Then to several thousand.  By the end of May, UPMC admitted that all 62,000 of its employees were at risk of identity theft, with at least 800 known cases of fraudulent federal tax returns caused by the hacking.

I became one of the statistics this morning to a variation on identity theft, when I received within a few minutes four text and email messages, marked URGENT, from the bank of my main credit card.  Four purchases overnight were made on my credit card, and (for some reason) not approved by the bank.  The bank was contacting me, to determine if I had indeed purchased $61.30 from "Register A" company, $500 from a computer programming company, $499.97 in women's accessories (ME???) from "BAGZ", and $1,190.30 from "Tokyo GM Shokai Company" sometime during the night.  

NO!!!

I called my bank within an hour of the text messages as requested, went through the usual identity questions, and confirmed that I had not made any of these purchases.  As a result of this my card number was immediately shut down and that account closed.  A new card, and a new number, will be sent to me very shortly.   

My first thought was practical.  What accounts automatically used this credit card number?  Within hours I caught the blowback.  A purchase I made on Amazon.com about a week ago, of a few books, was stopped because -- surprise to them, not to me -- my card was no longer valid. Amazon.com was seeking payment!  A phone call to them, I think, will give me a few days to allow me to give them a new credit card number.

My next one is EZ PASS.  It automatically debits my account $35.00 when I go below $10.00.  No tolls for me for the next week.

But then I began to think, what did I do to cause this theft?  Or did I do anything to cause this theft?  Was my set of numbers picked out by Russian hackers from a Target purchase (oops, guilty), or some other retailer who's been hit by hackers, or just by random access? 

According to Wikipedia, credit card theft only hits 0.1% of all U.S. transactions, and has been trending down over the past six years.  But that's 0.1% of 12 billion transactions, about 10,000,000--one out of every 1,200 transactions.    

I am glad that some algorithm in the fraud protections unit of the credit card computers picked up the unusual behavior (for me) on my account and acted to prevent payment.  Up to now credit cards were a pleasant and effective way to pay for things at stores and online.  But now I have become another statistic, and a victim of theft, just as if a pickpocket had done his work.