Two cards hijacked in last week!

Two of my credit cards were hijacked in the past week.  In both cases, the illicit transaction was caught by the credit card company (Discover and Citi, respectively) who texted me fraud alerts. The Discover card has been cancelled and replaced. I got the new card in 2 days and it's back in service. I just called Citi's fraud department about today's breach. They tried to get away with "new cards will be sent in 5-7 days."  I said that would not be acceptable, please overnight them. I wasn't real impressed with the alertness of the account rep I talked to, so I repeated this point 2 or 3 times. We'll see if the cards get here.

The Discover frauds were all in-store purchases, which means that they actually stole the number and cloned the card.
Unclear about the Citi card. Both charges were in New York City, which suggests they may also have been physical cards.

If that's the case, Barnes & Noble could be in trouble as they accepted one of the two fraudulent transactions. As of October 1, any store that does not have chip-reader cards is responsible for credit card fraud. And with good reason. Cloned cards don't work on chip-reader POS terminals. So it's about time all the retailers out there quit whining and dragging their feet and just implement the new technology already.

So how did they get our card numbers? Well, as it happens these are two of our newer cards, so it's not hard to look back at the purchase history. The Discover card has mostly been used with Apple Pay, which is pretty much unhackable. And the only two retailers where we have used both the Citi and the Discover card sans Apple Pay were...  Home Depot and Ace Hardware. 

Thanksgiving in Portland - New House

So Amber and Olin found this cute little house just over the border into Milwaukie, an improbably named suburb south of Portland. It's got new floors, a huge yard, and more storage space than they ever imagined they could have. It's only 6 miles to Amber's school - accessible by a lovely off-road bike path.


 Best of all, closing was schedule for Nov 30 - right in the middle of our Thanksgiving trip! How great is that? Of course it didn't quite work out that way. By Nov 30 the sellers weren't even close to finishing all the stuff they had promised to fix and had barely started moving out. Closing  got pushed to Dec 3, but the realtor arranged the "final inspection" for Tues, Dec 1, so we could see the inside of the house before we had to fly home. We were really excited to see it and glad we did, but the state of affairs 2 days before closing was pretty disheartening.
 
Yet somehow by Dec 4 (Friday) they had it all done. The papers got signed and the keys were handed over. Here they are in their new house on Friday evening.

Of course Lena started feeling better shortly after the grandparents left the scene, and was just as delighted as her parents. Today they rented a truck and moved all the stuff from the storage locker into the house. Amber reports that Lena had a wonderful time tearing around in the empty house.