At some point, a local pizza shop that I order from often had a data breach and my saved credit card number was stolen. I woke up this morning to find my card was used overnight to spend over 700.00 at nflshop.com, and for a few Uber transactions.
~True Story
Does this story sound familiar to you? It’s 100% true for me. As I woke this morning, I found these attempted charges against my credit card. Unlike most people that wake to the reality of their card number having been stolen, I’m not worried at all. I didn’t lose a penny. I don’t need to call the bank. When I get a new card number, I don’t need to update all my accounts everywhere the number is saved. I don’t really even need to shut this card off or do anything about it. Does this surprise you? If you read my post last October about how to protect yourself from this exact situation (read the post here), you’d know why.
I use a service from Privacy.com. With this service, I create a unique credit card number for each merchant. Once that card is used by a merchant, it can only ever be used by THAT merchant. So, if what happened to me happens, the transactions automatically decline anywhere other than at that pizza shop.
That’s right. Hackers stole my card number and I DO NOT CARE. Of course, I’ll let the merchant know, so they can (hopefully) take steps to notify their customers of this data breach. But other than that, there’s really nothing I need to do.
Today could easily have been a bad day with a drained bank account, spending the day on the phone trying to get my money back, being without a card until I get a new one in the mail, etc. But for me, it’s just another day. All thanks to Privacy.com.
And NO, this is NOT a sponsored post. Privacy did not contact me about this, ask me to write anything about this, etc. I do not ever get paid to post.
Having said that… Privacy.com does have a referral system. If you sign up using this link, you get 5.00 for trying it out and I get 5.00 for referring you.