Check your credit card / credit information more often. My friend just got back from out of the country vacation. He got a $25K AX credit card bill and $15K Visa bill.

The charges were in the US and he was not in the country. He is dealing with the credit card companies to clear the charges.

The credit card companies told him the the cards were applied online. That must be a professional, inside job. How can you get away from charging that much money?

Damm... Why people don't work hard and make money the honest way?

Just a rant...

When Target and Home Depot were hit recently the hackers stole data from the companies that operate payment transactions for Target and HD. They didn't even hack Targets actual servers, rather it was the payment card company.

They stole transaction records for nearly everyone who has every swiped a card at Target and HD in the last 6 months.

This is why you should never enter your pin while shopping about. Always use the credit card option.

Also keep an ear out for phone calls. I received one that tried to trick me into providing my SS#. This was only a few days ago. They claimed to be Bank of America and wanted me to verify my social so they could transfer me to an secure agent. I hung up but I believe many would fall for it.

Also watch out for calls from numbers that start with 0000 or 999 as those are almost always from outside the country or using a masking software.

I got one too. I knew it was a scam right away because I don't bank with BoA

So what your saying is if I get one of those calls, that I need to totally waste their time and feed them some bogus numbers and information, right?

TRUTH. I have always avoided using my PIN but recently got fed up with the delay the gas stations have with charging you the actual amount you got instead of just the $1 make sure you have a balance fee so I started to use my PIN. Within 2 weeks of that, I was a victim of identity fraud with that account. 12 years of shopping online without an issue and literally within 2 weeks I got jammed. Unreal.

X2 spend the time and the money to keep track of what is on your credit report. I am meeting with a financial advisor Friday. I've always believed in taking care of my own finances but for peace of mind i am having an advisor look my accounts and my credit over. It turns out I am an "authorized user" to a Bank of America account with a high credit limit and balance. Weird as I have never used Bank of america or affililiates. Neither has any of my family...... No Bueno.

So I actually worked for a credit card processor for awhile and now work at a credit monitoring/identity theft company. Unfortunately, we live in a brave new world and people work very hard to get your information and get well rewarded for it.

As far as the original poster, sounds like your buddy's information was stolen. Either a breach at one of the thousands of places that your ssn is uploaded to, malware on his computer, or he fell for a phishing scam. The last two are still one of the most common ways people lose their identities. CC breaches like those at Target and Home Depot, while large, only provides thieves with two things, the cc info(usually just # and exp) and then a zip of the store they were used at. Zip code is the only thing most companies use to do an address validation. Seeing how most people go to stores in their own zip code, this is very helpful to the bad people on getting good card numbers. Fraud charges on cc's are a pita, but are easily fixed and consumers almost never get stuck with the bill. Identity theft like the op's friend had is a little more difficult, and people using the ssn for stuff like IRS tax return and tax return fraud is a very bad experience.

While it all sounds horrible, its fairly easy to protect yourself for most of the bad things.
- Check your credit report. You get 3 free a year. One with each bureau. Don't use them all at once, use each one every four months to see if any new accounts have been opened. You can also set freezes with the bureaus where nothing can be opened without your permission, but its a pita as you have to reset every 90 days.
- Monitor your cc statements. With all the mobile apps and online tools, this is easy. You don't have to check 24x7, but keep tabs on them and report stuff if you don't recognize them. Alot of times, thieves run test charges for $1 or so on random online stuff to see if the card is good before going app sh!t with it.
- Protect yourself! Understand what phishing scams are and how to identify them. My wife can still fall for them to this day if I don't stay on her. Also....virus scans all the time. At one point malware was just a pain. Now it can lead to anything from turning your machine into a bot or recording info like logging into your bank account. Bad stuff! People always want to blame the big, evil, greedy companies for losing data, but you'd be surprised at the amount of data that gets lost because of a lack of personal responsibility on their own computer/logins/passwords/etc.

Personally, I like Credit Karma as a free service that does credit monitoring. Its always trying to upsell you stuff and other services, but its easy and free for people that just want more info without spending money. The pay companies offer more but its up to what you have to lose if you think its worth it.

If you're really interested in some of this stuff, krebsonsecurity is a cool site that talks about different breaches, hackers, etc that's relevant today.

Sorry for the rant. Just wanted to provide some info to people who are concerned as there is so much misinformation out there.

- stay safe!

Also keep an eye out for smaller fraudulent charges. I've had charges for several hundred dollars that were easy to spot, but in the last couple of years my CC company has called me about charges just under $50- they happened way outside of my geographical spending pattern so that's how their fraud department noticed, but just scanning my bill I might have missed them.

Send me your credit card numbers and I'll take care of you.

They charged $10 from Zappos.com to my card and then again yesterday.

Cancelling card now.

If you shopped at Home Depot or Target in the last year trust me --- cancel your cards!

Wow, my friend had the exact same situation. But the charges have not yet been dropped, and the trial has been going on for six months. After this incident, I began to study the sphere of money, recently read about the fintech industry an open banking player, and used Dashdevs for this. There are many good and bad nuances in this area that are important to know. People want to make money from this dishonestly, this is important and must be stopped.

Guess who ultimately pays. Somebody pays the price for all the fraud. You pay it in higher fee's, higher interest rates, but be sure of the fact that the price of fraud is passed on to the consumer, somehow. So now look at electronic money. It's even worse!