Public Service Announcement...Check ALL accounts for theft!

In this digital age; I am very conscious of identity theft!
I religiously check all my credit card accounts online constantly for unauthorized charged, etc. and I shred everything that has my address on it (also friends and family addresses on return address labels, etc.). I have links on my phone for all of my credit card companies, etc. so it makes it very easy to check them all quickly!

However, I have a Starbucks app that I load gift card money to all the time! Everyone that knows me gives me Starbucks money - LOL! I just had a birthday and I knew I had a lot of money in my Starbucks account (I do not link it to my bank account to reload but I had just added a few gift cards all at once).

Long story short; I was playing on my phone over the weekend and happened to pop open the Starbucks app because I was getting star points and was not making purchases!!! I opened my account and saw my account balance was only around $50 which was way low since I just added those new gift cards! Since I am working in Pittsburgh now (no traveling for a while) I am trying to save money and take my coffee from home to work so I knew I had not gotten any Starbucks recently to spend all that money.

So, I checked the app under the Purchase History tab and this is what I saw....

Needless to say; someone had gotten my account number and made many, many purchases from my account in California! I live in PA and the purchases were California! The only ones that are mine are the highlighted purchases.  I only get tea or coffee so my purchases are always under $3! All those other charges was someone using my account loaded onto a fake card!! Thank goodness I checked as I am sure they would have kept spending until it was gone!

 

I called Starbucks customer service and they were awesome! They closed that card account and transferred my monies to a new card and they credited all the fraudulent purchases back my account and said they are going to check footage to see if they can catch the people that used the fake card! They said this happens all the time and a lot of the time people don't notice; they assume they spent it themselves!

 

Hopefully they will get them!! I HATE thieves and identify theft! So...if you don't use gift card accounts frequently - make sure you still check those balances too as Starbucks was able to credit me back since I caught it fairly quickly! 

 

Hopefully I can help someone else avoid having their account ripped off too!!! UGH!