1 post tagged “ohio”

Or at least my credit card company thinks so.

Some background.

As the regular readers know, and are sick of hearing by now, we just moved.

My credit card company knew this too.

I called them the week before we moved with the new address.

Which is why it galls me that I caused a major backup at the local Target store here.

See, the credit card company fraud early detection unit had been monitoring my account.

The $200 plus I attempted to spend at Target was more than their nerves could take and they put a halt to my fraudulent ways.

The cashier was confused.  The lane manager was summoned.  Who summoned the shift manager.

All while the line grew to Star Wars Episode One opening week proportions.

The red phone was used.  All of us waited on hold.  The cashier interrogated me, by proxy, for the credit company.

The other two managers saw this as a training opportunity for him.

He saw it as an unnecessary delay in his lunch break.

Forms of ID were passed all around the group.

More questions were asked and answered.

Finally, I was handed back all my kit and told it was my turn to actually use the red phone.

I was immediately put on hold.

It was AC/DC, so you know, I was cool with it.

Much to the ire of the assembled tribes of Israel behind me in line, seeking exodus from the land of red and khaki retail oppression.

Then I was, very politely, interrogated as to what I had been doing and buying and staying, and traveling to, and gassing up and eating.

You see, all of these purchases for the last week were outside of my NORMAL spending zone and were not the types of purchases normally made.

There were lots of service station gas and food charges, and fast food restaurants, and motels, all within a short period of time and in a straight line away from my NORMAL spending zone.

It was almost exactly like the charges were following Interstate 75 down from Detroit to Cincinnati, with a layover in the night at Dayton, from there to I-71, around Louisville, then I-265 and 65, around and South, straight into Nashville, where there were more hotel and restaurant and gas charges.

And then, THEN, I had the nerve to go to Target and buy $200 plus of furnishings.

I was almost EXACTLY like I had moved from Detroit to Nashville, and taken two days to drive down, my wife in one car with the kids, and me in the truck with the two dogs, stopping for the night in Dayton, which is almost exactly the halfway point (just a little shy actually because we got a late start on day one with the movers).  And then spending another night in hotel in Nashville waiting for the movers to arrive, unload, and having gotten all that done, gone shopping for all the little things you don't move with you to your new house, when you're going to rent out your old house.

I got to explain all of this, in three-part harmony (with apology to Arlo Guthrie but the kids were getting vocal by this point), to the early fraud detection unit.

I also reminded them, that I had called them the previous week, to notify them that I was moving.

They had my old address, my new address, and they had the recent change on file as my last contact with them.

And yet, they needed me to connect the dots for them.

Hmm, all the bililng charges run in a straight line along the interstates from the old address to the new address, and then the day after they get there, they go shopping at the Target 2 miles from their new address.

Yeah, it all sounds really fishy to me, couldn't possibly make any sense of it.  We better freeze the account to make sure.

And yet I think of all the times that I've flown somewhere really random without telling the credit company, rung up really absurd and suspicious, even to me charges, and haven't heard a peep from them.

This one, this one actually made sense given that they knew I was moving.  I'm the one that told them.

Crisis resolved I was allowed to make my purchase and escape before the mob began line-dancing to the Achy-breaky.

Geesh.