On another note, what happened to me is someone went through Paypal and was somehow able to purchase goods using my savings account number. These items were shipped to an out of state address, from what I was told. I have never used Paypal and the process I had to go through in order to get my money back (over 2K) was amazing. First, it took some time trying to get Paypal to communicate with me and I ended up having to set up a Paypal account in order for them to communicate with me. It took close to a month to get my funds put back in my savings account. How they got my savings account number is also beyond my comprehension. I also wish I could have known who did this….

Thanks to a very vigilant Financial Institution that we belong to and a certain amount of separate monitoring that was in place, they only managed to get approximately $800 instead of the $1700 in actual charges. My husband headed to the nearest branch and I called the 1-800 number. Within minutes we had the cards shut down and cancelled. Besides the initial phone call, I spent about 10 minutes filling out online fraud forms and submitting them. All of the money was back in my account within 6 working days. My new cards arrived in 7 days and my financial institution waived the due date and late fees on a couple of payments that were due that week. They let me make the payments without penalty or interest when the money was back in my account.

This is the first time we have ever been hit. What helped us, was an excellent long term clean record with our financial institution and both “paid for” and “self “ monitoring we have in place on our accounts. We continue to monitor all of our accounts and our credit scores.