Another month, another credit card I have to cancel.
This time I had to destroy my PayPal debit card because I was watching my transaction records, as I do, and saw an email about a $105 transaction at the Meijer store in Lima, Ohio. Now I’ve never been to Lima, Ohio so that was a curious transaction that caught my eye, to say the least.
Thinking I’d be a good citizen I called Meijer to see if there was any way that we could just void out that transaction or at least they could tell me what “I” purchased. After all, perhaps it was something online. But no, it wasn’t to be, their privacy regulations don’t let them share that information with customers. So I contacted PayPal and their response was that I needed to cancel the card. So I canceled the card, with extreme prejudice.
They’re sending me a new one post haste — so I can keep using it, of course! — and meanwhile I had to destroy the old one.
The timing was rather awkward, however, because the next day I was getting on a plane to San Francisco, heading to a conference. I’m glad that I actually have a second credit card which I’ve used on this trip because I don’t really want to face the prospect of traveling without any sort of credit card in this modern era. I know I could use cash, but traveling with a lot of cash makes me anxious and I’d rather not do that if I can avoid it.
Truth be told I’ve been saying for a while that the existing form of credit cards is a fail and no longer works. When the only thing that proves I am the owner of the card is the fact that it’s in my wallet, that’s a fail.
And keep in mind that this transaction in Ohio happened without my card being present, which certainly makes me wonder how that came to occur. Obviously the information must’ve been lifted from a legitimate transaction or somewhere that I used the actual card. Unfortunately that’s very, very hard to track down as those of you that have had fraudulent transactions are well aware of. Frustrating.
Truth be told credit cards need to be tied to biometrics of some sort, and the numbers need to change each time you use them. I’m not exactly sure what that would look like, though I’ve seen many possibilities at places like CES, but whatever it next, this piece of plastic in my wallet isn’t working any more.
And it won’t surprise me if in the next few months I have to cancel yet again and get yet another credit card. It’s a bit of a mess, and we haven’t even talked about hackers getting access to millions or tens of millions of cards either.
