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Mailboxes are just as breachable in the US, but the credit card companies and banks seem willing to eat the cost of occasional fraud. One year I had an epic we
by sgtnoodle 6y ago
Mailboxes are just as breachable in the US, but the credit card companies and banks seem willing to eat the cost of occasional fraud.
One year I had an epic week of fraud. My credit card number was stolen by someone involved with a local restaurant, the replacement credit card was stolen from my mailbox, and my rent check was stolen from my landlord's mailbox at a completely different address (and successfully cashed!) There was a 3 day period where the only money I had access to was the cash in my wallet because my credit cards, checking account and savings account were all frozen while their account numbers got switched. All the fraud was covered by my bank though.
- owenmarshall 6y agoA similar experience when younger (and less financially secure!) has lead me to embrace n+1: my emergency fund (the part that isn’t in the coffee can in the freezer) lives in a separate bank than my checking, and I carry an Amex and a Visa as backup and pay with credit at all times. I haven’t needed the redundancy since then but it’s comforting to know that I have a multi-month cushion to fight with banks if I need one.
- chrischen 6y agoFraud can also be covered by the merchants, if thy didn’t use the chip. That’s why credit card companies are so eager to simply promote sales.
- namibj 6y agoIn the EU, the issue with checks doesn't exist. SEPA direct debit is the usual setup for places where you'd expect to be able to pay via credit card (regardless of fees), and for e.g. small landlords you just set up a recurring SEPA push transfer (basically like ACH push, but free for normal consumer accounts) to the landlords account. And for direct debit, you can technically just keep an eye out for unauthorized ones (they need to be shown to your bank 5 days in advance) and tell your bank to stop them before they debit your account. But AFAIK it's the bank(s) that owe you the money, though they can in-turn try to claw it back from whoever debited your account without authorization. Really, the worst one can do with an IBAN is trolling by spamming transfers to it or signing it up for direct debits (and I'd expect that to cause me at most 1 bank day of no funds, while waiting for my bank to reverse a fraudulent debit). But the impact of the latter is limited (just set up a whitelist with your bank and have them auto-reject the spam), while the former is fairly costly (around 20~30 ct with the accounts that don't do fair-use throttling) and quite risky (harassment and KYC).
- ungamedplayer 6y agoHow did someone else cash the cheque, this blows my mind.
- sgtnoodle 6y agoBased on the digital image of the check my bank had, they wrote over the payee name rather poorly, then took it to a sketchy payday loan type place.