The other day I got an email I hoped I would never get:
BENJAMIN A,
It's important that we speak with you.
Please call us at 1-800-427-9428.
With your assistance, we would like to verify some potentially suspicious activity that we have detected on your MASTERCARD PLATINUM account ending in XXXX. We want to ensure that all charges have been authorized by you. In order to avoid any inconvenience it is very important that we speak with you. Please call us at 1-800-427-9428 as soon as possible.
Yup, my credit card was hacked. There were a half dozen random charges on my card that had clearly not been made by me. Besides the random charges I'm sure the activity was suspicious since I've only used my card about a half dozen times in the last two years, let alone two day.
I'd like to send a big Ahoy Hanoi thank you to Capital One for canceling my card. I'd like to send a big Ahoy Hanoi F-U to whoever hacked my card. Not cool!
The irony in this is that last week I had two visitors in town (a friend of a friend and my friend's brother). My friend's brother asked me if anyone takes credit cards in Hanoi. While explaining that a few places will take credit cards, I took mine out to look at the expiration date. I was happy to see that the date was a year away. This was comforting to me because my driver's license and ATM card are about to expire. Well, now that Capital One canceled my card I'm sort of plastic free for a few weeks. If I was in America this would be a big deal. However, in a cash country this doesn't make me stress at all.
