Well this was a surprise as I was simply doing my regular bill payments with my credit card. For some reason it kept getting declined and I was presented with messages such as \u201cFinancial Institution Response: Declined.\u201d So to me it was obviously blocked for whatever reason and therefore I went ahead and contacted the bank. As usual the automated process asks you to enter your number over the phone followed by the pound sign. This is the first time I heard a message afterwards where the voice message said \u201cWe need to talk to you about your account.\u201d<\/p>\n
The live representative informed me that someone attempted to use my credit card six times on a transaction I had no idea about. So, the procedure is to terminate the card and a new one would be issued. I was trying to think hard how this would be possible as I haven\u2019t had problems for years and I usually use it in the same places all the time. I was then thinking back last year and literally the only new place I decided to make a purchase with my credit card was from the site Aliexpress.com. Normally I would be extremely hesitant to shop with vendors in foreign countries. All that news about how Alibaba and its IPO success along with a sales event made me curious to try it as a consumer.<\/p>\n
Of course this isn\u2019t concrete proof that my credit card number got stolen as a result of that site, but I track all of my spending diligently and that was literally the only new company I made a purchase with. So the timing is a little too coincidental I think. One good thing I thought was how efficient the credit card\u2019s security system is in blocking unauthorized and suspicious transactions to create the flag.<\/p>\n
Looks like I will be down a few days without my main credit card. Be interesting if others have experienced a similar situation after making a purchase with Aliexpress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well this was a surprise as I was simply doing my regular bill payments with my credit card. For some reason it kept getting declined and I was presented with messages such as \u201cFinancial Institution Response: Declined.\u201d So to me it was obviously blocked for whatever reason and therefore I went ahead and contacted the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[5],"tags":[5181,5418,5420,5419,4704,5417,683],"class_list":["post-6366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-financial-management","tag-alibaba","tag-aliexpress","tag-bill-payments","tag-charge-fraud","tag-credit-card-fraud","tag-credit-card-freeze","tag-identity-theft"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.al6400.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/HNCK3323-1300x866.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6VnHC-1EG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al6400.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al6400.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al6400.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al6400.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al6400.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.al6400.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6367,"href":"https:\/\/www.al6400.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6366\/revisions\/6367"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al6400.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al6400.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al6400.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al6400.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}