credit card fail.
Yesterday, when I was about to pay for groceries, the cashier asked to see my ID. This puzzled me, so I asked why, as I wasn't buying alcohol or anything unusual. Turned out that the signature strip on the back of my credit card had been worn down so much that my signature was illegible. Of course, this had to be one of the occasions when I didn't have any ID on me. Fortunately, she accepted the signature off of one of my other cards.

Today I decided I'd rather not have to do this again, so I called up customer service to order a replacement card. "Enter your account number" *beep beep beep...* "enter your zip code" *beep beep beep* "This account is closed".

w.t.f.

I waited a short time to get through to a human, and explained what had happened. Turns out that a few days ago, "fraud activity" was spotted on my account, and they blocked the card. Apparently there's a new one in the mail to me already.

I asked for more information on what exactly had happened, but they weren't very forthcoming with details. From the way she described it, they don't have a lot of details themselves. Putting the scant details together, it appears that what happened was something along the lines of a store got broken into which had my details, the perpetrators were caught, and law enforcement told the credit card company the list of potential card numbers that could be compromised. Turns out mine was one of those that was. Something like $2000 of bogus charges were run up before it was blocked, which were refunded before I'd even realized there was a problem.

Sucky, But at least it's all sorted.