It's Happened Again!!

Identity theft and fraud are just running rampant! The last time, someone got a hold of our credit card and was charging some airline tickets. That was a couple years ago. The time before that, someone was trying to charge $1500 at a pet store in South America. Well, it's happened again. They say that three times is a charm. I never was really sure what that meant. It doesn't seem like a good thing in my case.

In preparation for our trip to Costa Rica, we informed our credit card company that we were going to be out of the country and gave them the dates we would be there. The first time I tried to use my card at the "swanky" resort, it was rejected. Luckily, Butch had brought his American Express card. We ended up using that for the rest of our trip.

You can imagine I was pretty fired up. If Butch hadn't had his Amex card, we'd have been up a creek. We might have had to "borrow" from our friends when our cash ran out---or ask them to hook us on to their credit card. I'm glad it didn't come to that.

I went online to see if somehow I could figure out how to contact the company since we did not have international phone service. I noticed that we only had 220 "points" when I knew we had nearly a million. So that was a problem too. There really wasn't anything I could do while in Costa Rica. I was afraid that somehow those points had expired and were just lost.

On the way home, when we got to Dallas and turned on our phones, we each got several messages from the "fraud department." I called the next morning and found out that there was an attempt to get $17,800 in cash from our card. Turns out, it was just a coincidence and had nothing to do with Costa Rica. They immediately put a freeze on our cards until they could talk to us. Of course, that meant that the card had to be cancelled. You know what that means---all of those things that are automated charges now have to be changed. I know I'll forget some and have to deal with things as they come up. What a hassle.

My next order of business was to figure out what happened to all of our points. I contacted our financial advisor and asked him to look in to it. I was shocked at the answer. The $17,800 cash request was from someone "hijacking" our points and trying to cash them in!

Alls well that ends well. We've gotten our points back. And I'm so happy to know that we have enough points to pay for our next vacation! I had no idea you could turn them in for cash. We always planned to use the points for travel.

Whoever these crooks are---apparently they know they won't get caught. I just don't understand people that think they have a right to take from other people. We all work hard for what we have. Maybe the crooks should try that for a change and leave us alone!!