Well, looks like earlier today, my wife used my credit card and tried wiring about 925 bucks to my friend Mohamed in Cairo, Egypt. …What’s that? Weird? Well that’s because some gonad tried stealing my money! Identity theft! It can happen to you.
Somehow they got my debit card number and used Western Union to send money to Egypt. Luckily, Western Union called my folks’ house to confirm, and Mom called me, and I got everything figured out. Had to wait until night to call Bank One and Western Union, since their customer service lines open in the morning back home. Well, after about 6 hours of worrying about losing all the money in my bank account, everything is good now. Transaction was canceled before it was complete. New debit card is being mailed to me.
I have a feeling the clerk at the Softmap in Akihabara stole my card number. I ran both of my Visa cards (including the Bank One card) and he said they weren’t approved. That’s weird. So, I ended up using another card. The twip must have taken those numbers and sold it to the Yakuza or something, I dunno.
I’ll call the Embassy or something tomorrow and tell them what happened. There’s probably some kind of thing against this. I suspect this is a scam used on foreign tourists. If I wouldn’t have been contact about this, and it would have been another day or two, the transfer would have gone through and I would have been broke.
