Credit Card compromised

[BYU 14]

So I get a fraud alert from my credit card company and sign on to my account and sure enough it is frozen and there are a bunch of wierd pending charges on there.

I call and they are for 2 or 3 different "charities", Netflix, a couple of face to face and some online charges that all were submitted around 12:30am this morning. They mostly originate in California, but also from Boston, New Jersey and one from Germany.

Only thing I can think of is Paypal, which I used over the weekend to order some CD's. It was not my account, but the company I bought them from uses it. The other is Xbox live.

Has anybody had issues with their XBox account hacked or had anything happen through Paypal? I get the feeling the the company using Paypal is the culprit and their server got hacked, but it is hard to be sure at this point.

Thankfully the company caught everything and I will not be responsible for any of the charges and the account is now closed, but I have never dealt with this before and it is very aggravating. Anybody else have experience with this and if so are there any other safe guards I should take? I checked my bank accounts and my other CC and everything there is OK.

[Desnudo]

It is aggravating. Some other possibilities is your bank/card company got hacked or the info got stolen through a physical card scanner. So hard to figure out these days unless the bank tells you exactly what happened.

I've had my CC info stolen a few times with BofA. The hackers do exactly what you described, try a few different transactions to see if the card is active before they sell or use the numbers.

A couple of things to do immediately - run a malware scan your PC and change any online passwords you have that access payment info. Unfortunately not much else you can do and law enforcement doesn't really take an interest in these cases.

[BYU 14]

Thanks Des, changed passwords immediately after I got off the phone and ran AVG deep scan, found nothing but the usual tracking cookies.

I am pretty sure it was the Paypal account, since it is based in Cali and most of the charges originated there. Will just keep a real close eye on things for a few days and hope that was it. That card scanner deal popped up to since we were in New York last week and that seems like a mecca for that kind of stuff, though I would think they would have tried to use it sooner.

[Autumn]

I had a problem a couple months ago that was somehow related to Paypal. We never found out exactly how it had happened, but it was either someone at the small business we were paying (which is possible but seemed unlikely for various reasons) or PayPal.