My wife and I keep getting our debit cards stolen online. We notice the charges and are able to dispute them and cancel our cards, but it sure is annoying.
We don’t put our card information on suspicious websites. They’re on well known websites like amazon and Facebook.
We ran out emails through a data breach checker and it found nothing.
I don’t think there’s any malware on our devices.
Any idea what could be happening and how to prevent it?
As others have mentioned use a credit card instead of debit.
But if you need/want to use a debit card, then take a look at services like Revolut or Wise (non-referal links included).
Both provide you with debit cards that you can enable/disable instantly within their app. Revolut gives you “virtual cards” which can be used for online subscription, so you can create a dedicated virtual card for each subscription (minimizing the impact if/when one of your cards is leaked). Revolut also has “one time use cards”, so a new debit card number for a single purchase. In practice, more and more vendors are disallowing “one time use cards”, but you can create a similar effect with the virtual cards.
Both platforms also allow you to set up dedicated (monthly) spending limits on either the physical or virtual cards. So you can limit your exposure that way too.
On top of just being a good idea in general, this could help OP figure out how their cards are getting stolen. Use a unique card number for each different service, and you can tell which service is compromised, either in your use of it, or in the service itself.
You said you use your credit card on Facebook and you’re not sure why it’s getting stolen …🙄🤔
Something tells me you’re keylogged if you keep cancelling, ordering new ones and getting pwned within days of the new card arriving. Format your computers. Use more open source tools whose code you can audit. Firefox instead of Chrome, no sketchy extensions like Honey and cash back stuff. If you pirate stuff, try to do it from verified sources.
whose code you can audit
More like whose code is audited by someone or someones you choose to trust. Let’s be honest here, average Joe isn’t auditing shit.
You mean you don’t read the billions of lines of code contained in all of the open source apps that you use? Shame, shame… :)
It happens within months, not days. I don’t use honey and I don’t pirate. I use both chrome and Firefox, but maybe I should stick to Firefox.
Don’t save your cards in browsers anywhere.
Most likely a device that you own is infected. Have you completely delete and reset all your devices?
Running a virus scan wouldn’t be enough? I’d rather not factory reset everything.
how do I fix this?
probably like this.
No :(
To be fair, factory resets are a huge pain in the ass. Might as well try other things before busting out the nuclear option.
Once you suspect a device is infected the only good option is the nuclear option. Anything else will not be guaranteed to 100% remove it, or really, anywhere near close to that, or even detect everything wrong in the first place or after attempted removal. And with a month long period between attacks that is a long time to wait and see to see if any other option might work.
deleted by creator
No, it won’t. If you value that situation enough to post here, you should also listen to the advices you’re given.
If you have an antivirus running and you’re still being pwnd, a scan won’t change anything.
Format everything, computers, phones, everything with an Internet connection really. Yes, it’s a pain, but also yes, it’s necessary.
Do it
I use Privacy for everything. I can easily cancel and dispute cards and not have to go through the new card song and dance.
A lot of other good comments here but I would also recommend not swiping your card at ANY machine. I had my debit card # lifted several times before I finally decided to only use something secure like ApplePay (at the gas pump particularly). Apple Pay changes the card number every single time it’s used. So, it can at least pinpoint the exact moment it was stolen if it somehow did give up your info. I’ve never had to worry about my card number getting stolen since I made that change.
I don’t have apple pay, but I do use Google pay whenever I can.
Google Pay will do the same thing so you should be good there. It’s called credit card tokenization.
And it’s even better than you described. The one time token isn’t a new card number, it’s not a card number at all. It’s basically Apple saying “yep this is legit” to the other computer, and then the two banking systems do their money transfer on the back end.
Even if someone could intercept it and decrypt it, it would be completely useless because that’s just not a thing.
Pretty sure Google does basically the same thing. Never used it though.
