journal features

debit card fraud (or is it FUD)

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2014.01.20

Today I attended a seminar on securing personal data, presented by someone with experience in the credit card world at the highest levels. The conversation veered away from IT security standards into consumer issues, and I learned some things that are important for anyone who uses debit to make purchases in this country.

The suggestion is to STOP using a debit card to make purchases if the debit card is connected to any bank account with significant funds.

1. The risk is the card being compromised and the accounts attached cleaned out.

2. Getting your money back once it’s been cleaned out due to debit card fraud can be difficult and slow.

3. Debit card fraud is now more substantial than credit card fraud in Canada; this is an everyday risk.

The strong suggestion from the seminar (and again, someone in the credit card business, so caveat emptor) was to use a credit card, check, or cash instead.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)