The Inimitable Tiff

Late last week, a bogus company called Adele Systems charged $0.22 to my main debit card account. Having seen irregular, test-the-waters activity from the “merchant” my bank—a well-respected credit union—flagged them for investigation and began notifying all cardholders with a similar charge. Adele Systems was found to be fraudulent, so all debit cards were cancelled within a few hours of the first charge getting flagged in their transaction system.

Banks quickly fighting fraud! …But then there’s their *lousy* follow-up by my bank.

My bank called me Friday afternoon and left an unverified message that there “was a problem with my card”. No phone number, no agent name, to verification info from my account…just an ambiguous message. They called around 4 p.m.. Their customer support closed at 7 p.m. I got the message at 7:10 p.m. I seriously considered it to be a phishing scheme for my PIN.

With the warning in mind, I used my debit card over the weekend and double-checked my online accounts. All looked normal; my card worked fine at a variety of establishments. Come Monday morning, my bank called *my dad*, who called me. I duly called my bank to get to the bottom of the issue. After 5 minutes on hold as they tried to track down the reason for the phone calls, it turns out they need to cancel my debit card and issue a new one and need my authorization.

Here it gets maddening: Issuing a new card will take 7-9 *business* days to arrive, and the PIN for it will be separately delivered after that. I have no card for two weeks. Any automatic payments or transactions queued up are now against a canceled card. My bank could expedite card delivery, but only by delivery signature (without a delivery time frame). ‘Could you be home over a two-day window?’ ‘Are you serious?’ To *change the address* for delivery—expedited or no—they need *written* permission. But not a fax. Writing in would take 2/3 days, arguably, putting “expedited” delivery almost at the same timeframe as normal delivery.

WTF! And to top it all, my bank recommended I get cash to cover bills for 2 weeks, but by the time I got to an ATM, my card was already canceled.

As I get “no payment” notices via e-mail and go about my usual online purchases and scheduled billing, I plan to convert to routing-number-based payment rather than a specific debit card. I have no doubt online fraud will continue, and I’ll have more force-issued debit cards. However, the number of retailers I trust with my routing information are few and far between. I hate paying PayPal’s service fees, for merchants where PayPal is an option—it’s a service my bank should provide, really. My bank should provide something like OpenID for financial information.

I expect they’ll get around to that sometime in the next millennia. In the meantime, I have limited access to my own money over Thanksgiving weekend. Guess who’s not getting thanked.