<p>Thursday evening I found out that our Discover cards had been “potentially compromised” through a merchant security problem and they reissued us new cards. I asked which merchant and the guy wouldn’t tell me.</p>
<p>I’m happy that they were proactive, but since it caused me a good bit of grief (I’ve had to call 7 places who charge monthly bills to my card and change the account numbers) I’d kind of like to know which merchant caused me all this trouble.</p>
<p>Did anyone else have this happen? Discover didn’t contact me and they didn’t freeze my old numbers right away, but an online tool I use to generate secure #s to use for online transactions wouldn’t work and when I logged into discovercard.com there was a message on the website. I called them and the guy said that the new cards were already enroute and we got them Saturday.</p>
<p>Last year three of our credit cards were compromised, and we received reports of this within a span of about two weeks. In my conversations with the issuers, I was told that there is such widespread thievery of card numbers that it is almost impossible to identify how whoever got your card number got it, when they got it, or where. Except, of course for those rarer cases when one large retailer has their entire system hacked. If it is a national retailer, then you usually will read about it in the press as well.</p>
<p>One suggestion from one bank, was that I look through my statements and see if there were any places where we had used all three cards, but they also told me that there was no telling how long ago the numbers could have been recorded, so even if I found that Gas Station X and Restaurant Y had all of those card numbers, that wouldn’t mean that either of those were the bad actors. It could be that a random card duplication cartel could simply have saved up a bazillion numbers over the years, and that it was just our dumb luck that three of our card numbers were stolen in the first place, and then released/sold to third parties who tried to use them in that two week span of time.</p>
<p>Had the same thing with our Discover Card (and pretty much the same, non-helpful conversation w/their customer service), card re-issue, etc – but that was over a year ago! Guess the problem is ongoing. Sigh. FWIW, there were have been no issues with inappropriate charges on that card…</p>
<p>I had this happen once to me and the biggest pain was that my old account number was locked and I lost access to my old statements online. This sort of thing seems to be pretty routine these days.</p>
<p>I knew about the zappos one, but I have never shopped there. I love the app that Discover has and normally when I buy online I use it to generate a one-time number for my use. The cards were just "potentially compromised’. I understand safe-better-than-sorry, but I am still trying to make sure all my auto-pay accounts are changed - no doubt I will miss someone and I will get a nasty letter for non-payment.</p>
<p>We just got a new Discover card because there were some weird charges. None were very large, (less than $200), but they were all Internet office supply places I didn’t recognize and one was for the exact same amount twice which is what initially caught my eye. </p>
<p>The same day my new Discover card arrived I also got a new Master Card for another account. How annoying! It’s really annoying for things like subscriptions that we pay monthly automatically.</p>
<p>I just double checked the bill and on line statement since several of you have had issues, but fortunately it looks ok. Big bill, though, since we just bought a new washer/dryer.</p>