“We apologize for cancelling your cards. The cards were ‘flagged’ due to a ‘breach.’ No, we can’t tell you Who – When – or How. Have a nice day and thank you for banking with us.”
Has this happened to you? What are your rights in this situation? Does it matter to you how your credit, debit or ATM card/account was breached? Do you have the right to know which merchant allowed an account to be breached? Suppose it was the bank itself?
The following is my personal experience. A separate post about what I did to address this issue will follow. If this has happened to you, I encourage you to read the second part and take the same steps I took. If these incidents aren’t addressed with regulatory agencies, the secrecy behind these breaches will continue and we will continue to be inconvenienced, or worse, we will continue to be at risk of having accounts compromised without knowing by whom, how, or why.
DECLINED. DECLINED. DECLINED.
It was a late sunny and hot Tuesday afternoon, summer was at it’s best. We had family visiting and we were all piling into cars, moving from enjoying a beautiful day at the ocean to joining friends for a boat ride on the the lake. A perfect summer beach day was becoming a perfect summer evening on Cape Cod.
My husband asked me to put gas in the car on my way to the lake. I pulled up to a pump and inserted my card. Declined. I tried using it as an ATM. Declined. I knew exactly how much was in my account, I check my accounts online just about every day. The message on the pump read, “See the agent inside.”
The clerk apologized, ran my card through, and told me to try to pump gas. No luck. “Try a different pump,” he told me. I drove to a new pump and inserted my card. Declined. The clerk came out and tried himself. Declined. I gave up and used a credit card, promising myself to make an immediate payment to avoid collecting interest charges. By the time I arrived at the lake I’d missed the boat. As I sat and waited for the group to make their way back to me, I thought about the trust I have in banks and how, once again, that trust seems to have been violated. I had money and yet I had no access that money and had no idea why …
The next morning I called Citizen’s Bank and asked why my card had been declined.
“We’ve had to cancel that card, it was ‘flagged’ for suspicious activity,” the customer service agent explained.
“What? When? How?” I was alarmed, “This is not the first time this has happened, and this is an incredible inconvenience!”
She told me that “sometimes hackers from other countries gain access to card numbers and they were trying to protect me.”
“Who are you protecting me from? Was my account hacked? When? What merchant allowed this? How did it happen?”
“We don’t have that information,” she explained.
I’d had it. This has happened with other cards in the past year. It happened with our Capital One credit cards at different times. It happened with my PayPal debit card. As is standard for me in these situations, I asked to speak to a supervisor and told the agent I knew she was just doing her job, but I needed to get more information than she could give me. There is no sense losing patience with an employee who can’t do anything about a situation.
The supervisor looked at my account and told me that,it was VISA who had put a hold on the account because the account had been “flagged” for suspicious activity.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said, “I can’t keep changing credit card numbers, I can’t keep contacting newspapers and other companies who automatically charge a card for services. This is incredibly inconvenient and disconcerting.”
“The Globe tried to charge the card last night, and it was declined,” she mentioned.
Great, my subscription to one paper has to be straightened out. And, it would have been nice to know this card was “flagged” and cancelled before trying to use it the previous day and dealing with the “declined” frustration and embarrassment!
I asked her to check the other debit card, the one attached to my primary account.
“That card has been flagged as well,” she told me. My husband was working in Boston and uses that card for parking and other expenses during the day. This is how we track his work expenses. To me, this has always been the responsible way to operate.
“Can you contact your husband and tell him we will be cancelling the card?” She asked. “If you do this within the next two hours I can cancel that card and overnight new cards to you.” She gave me a phone number to call her back.
My husband reminded me that he had important errands to run on the way home and we decided he’d have to cash his paycheck (they still don’t do auto deposits) and operate with cash, then make a deposit. He knows cash makes me nervous: easy to overspend, easy to lose track, no record of expenses, and no purchase protection.
STAY PUT. HAVE A NICE VACATION!
I called the supervisor back. She cancelled the second card and said she’d overnight both cards with FedEx. I needed to sign for them. “Wait!” I said, “I’m on vacation this week, I have to wait here for the cards? Is there a form I can fill out and leave for the delivery?”
“If you aren’t there the driver will bring them back to their regional offices and you will have to pick them up there, or be available the following day to sign for them,” she explained. “Have a nice vacation.”
CIRCUITOUS BLAME? PASS THE BUCK?
I hung up, did an online search and found a customer service phone number for VISA. I kept pressing zero to get to a human being rather than type the cancelled card number in and wait for an automated voice to tell me it was a non-existent number. I was finally connected to a customer service agent. I told her I wanted to know why the card was flagged and if it was breached or hacked how that happened. She told me the card was handled by Citizens, that she/they had no information about breaches or flags etc. “Hold on and I’ll transfer you to Citizen’s Bank ….”
“Wait, they told me, that you …” I sighed and told her to forget it, and hung up.
Middle Class Lives 