If you’ve prepared for losing your wallet, recovering from losing just one credit card is actually quite simple. What’s not as simple is discovering when you’ve actually lost a single card. In our current age of electronic commerce, it’s very easy to “lose” your credit card without actually losing the card. Card skimmers can steal your credit card’s data without you ever knowing it. Ecommerce companies, with lax data security, can experience data breaches that result in your credit card data being stolen.

While credit card companies are becoming very savvy in detecting fraud, as they are on the hook for most of it, they can’t catch everything.

(Click to continue reading…)

Last month, I went to a Trader Joe’s to buy a package of coffee filters. For whatever reason, their packages of unbleached cone filters are always remarkably cheaper than anywhere else, despite Trader Joe’s higher end reputation. On this particular trip, there was some sort of technical problem with the register. I would swipe my card, sign in the box, and then the system would skip the receipt printout step. Each time (this happened three times), the person working the counter would politely insist that charge didn’t go through and we’d have to swipe it again. We did this three times.

Unfortunately, the only technical problem was that a receipt wasn’t printed and it wasn’t until a week later that I saw I had three charges for one box of coffee filters. The tricky annoying part about all this was that the charges were for only $1.80 each, which meant I was only out $3.60. Part of me wished it was more like $360 so that be more worth my time to deal with it!

If you need to dispute a credit card charge, here’s what you should do:
(Click to continue reading…)