We’ve had an unsettling thing happen this past week. We received a call during the week that some rather unusual charges were being put on one of our credit cards. We found that one of the two cards we had been issued was missing. We thought that we may have inadvertently lost it the prior weekend at a store. Obvously, we closed that account and are having a new card issued to us. The thief got away with almost two hundred dollars.

Today we were looking at our checking account and found added unauthorized charges. We discovered that one of our debit cards was missing. We know that we had the card Thursday afternoon, so suspect that both cards were stolen by someone rifling through a desk while we were at work. We also have some checks missing…checks at the bottom of the stack so we wouldn’t miss them right away.

We put a stop payment on the checks, closed the debit card, and Monday will go in to the bank and have a new checking account issued to us. That sounds good and it is, but just imagine what we now will have to do with that new number.

We’ll have to order checks. We’ll have to get new debit cards. We’ll have to change the payment method on all of our automatic and on-line payments. It’s a mess.

We put a fraud alert on both of our credit accounts and are thinking about having new credit cards issued to us from other issuers in the off chance that the thief copied down numbers, but didn’t take the card. We also filed a police report. I don’t quite know where to go from here.

This isn’t identity theft per se. However, the consequences are much the same. We suspect an employee at the place where we work (not a specific employee…we don’t know that much). I feel sorry for them on the one hand, and on the other, I hope they get caught so they can get help, perhaps.

I’ll be working tonight on some of our other accounts. I’ll let you know if we have further problems. Life is complicated, sometimes.