Banks are required to notify clients if their credit card card security has been compromised.
I have two seperate PNC Bank credit cards and within 30 days they were both used fraudulently without my knowledge. I notified PNC immediately to cancel the accounts. The strange thing was that the cards were never out of my posession and the people who used my cards did not use them on Internet web sites - they did card present transactions.including some ATM transactions. I asked PNC how that could have happened and they said they did not know. They also refused to grant me a temporary credit on all the fraud charges until an investigation was completed.
I found this very unusual because other banks normally give a temporary credit while the investigation is being done. They told me I would need to sign an affadavid, (which I have no issue with doing.) However, they told me I could not fill it out at one of their branches, they could not fax it to me, they could not email it to me. I had to wait for them to send it to me via postal mail and once I returned it via postal mail they would maybe issue a temporary credit in 10 days. When you have been ripped off by credit card fraud for a lot of money this is not what you want to hear.
But it gets worse. PNC Bank and other banks know how it is happening because there have been massive credit card fraud schemes occuring in the last year. News media reported this week how credit card theives stole 45 million credit cards / debit cards and committed massive fraud.
Theives stole credit card information from retailers systems and created copies of debit cards and credit cards via wireless computer devices - they even got the pin numbers and encryption info. Many popular retailers were compromised.
WIth this mass scale of fraud the banks knew that many retailers systems had been compromised and did not inform or warn customers like me to limit debit card usage at major retail stores.
If they did not know when this volume of fraud was happening they should have known and detected the patterns. Further, when I reported the fraud they should not have pretended they did not know how such a thing could happen. Nor should they give consumers a hard time about a temporary credit. PNC Bank claims this is standard process and they have departments and process that needs to be followed. I have not had problems like this with other banks in the past. Once you report credit card fraud it should not be the card holders responsibility to float the amount of the fraud as a loan to the bank while they investigate it.
I want to warn all consumers this can happen and to consider changing their credit and debit card numbers. Also be careful about over using debit cards with retailers.
I blame retailers for poor security of credit card data - and they hae been penalized. But shame on PNC Bank too for its poor customer service and not warning its clients of these threats when they should have known what was happening.
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