While checking emails today, we got this notice from the bank that issued our credit card.

Seems these charges were attempted today:

Raymondnext $73.77

SCRIBD 7.99

Turns out both of the vendors are legitimate: https://www.scribd.com/ and https://raymondnext.com/.

We’ve never heard of them before!

While talking with the bank’s representative, he assured us that charges would not be accepted. The representative told us the smaller charge came through early this morning (around 4:00 am) ; that charge was followed bu the larger charge. Another charge for several hundred dollars came some time later, but by then the bank had already stopped all charges.

That’s the pattern, the bad boys bounce small innocuous charges to see whether the card number is a working one. When the charge is accepted, other larger dollar values follow. The scammers / fraudsters / grinches are just throwing darts into cyperspace knowing that somewhere, sometime some will hit targets.

Good for us, our bank’s fraud protection is pretty solid. We check our credit card and banking accounts each day looking for transactions that don’t make sense.

So no damage done. The bank is overnighting another card with another number. We’ll have to change card info with every auto-pay account we have, and things will be as they were before until the next time.

Remember what Sergeant Esterhaus said, “Hey, let’s be careful out there.”