Can't she just call the report in? We take fraud reports over the phone all the time.

And why 10 days? Most banks can have that stuff back in your acccount by the next business day....

Oops, I worded that funny. I meant she has to go down to the bank, not the police station, but I'm sure she'll go to the police station (as opposed to calling) anyway, because she's weird like that. What do you guys do when people call in about this stuff?

10 days seems like a long time to me, too. Her bank is called Cal National. I haven't heard of it before, and I live in California, so it's probably not that big! If that was my money they were holding up that long, I'd be shitting bricks.

We just take a report because the bank usually requires it (because if it turns out you lied about everything, they can charge you with filing a false police report). Typically it's just a documentation thing on our side -- the bank has its own fraud investigators who handle the case.

10 days is crazy! Must be a smaller bank, because all the larger ones but your money back pretty quickly. That sucks, but at least she's getting it back, I guess.

oh my gosh, that's crazy! how did they steal it?

We don't know, because she has all of her credit cards and ATM cards, etc. in her purse! The bank said that people can make copies of your cards now, because scammers put these devices on ATM machines that copy the strip on the back of your card, and they can get your PIN that way, too. The withdrawals are all at ATMS, so they needed a card and the PIN. I'm not sure how they got the hotel rooms though!

It's amazing how people can get your information. Most of the time they never actually find out. We get reports sometimes where all these charges start showing up in other countries -- insane stuff, like $800 dinners in Italy kinda stuff.

My boyfriend actually had some fraud on his debit card a few months ago. Still have no idea where they got his info from, because he still had his card. A bunch of the charges were through some sort of foreign currency conversion service, though. He's assuming they got the number through a purchase he made online, but it's not like he'd made any purchases through any questionable web sites. And we get fraud reports all the time from people who don't even USE the internet. Crazy.