My American Express Platinum Card Gets Cloned… Again

I’m a pretty wary person. An Internet-saavy guy. Someone who is pretty well versed in all the phishing and identity theft schemes out in the wild.

So you can imagine the smirk when I took a glance at this e-mail that arrived at my inbox today:

HAH! Yeah right! Just another phishing attempt… right? I mean… come on - $xxx spent at google? Riiiight.

Until I noticed that it really did have the last 6 digits of my credit card. Hm. That’s hitting a bit close to home.

And then I scrolled down further to see the URL - suspecting that the tooltip would say “http://americanexpress.somewhereevil.ru” But instead, it really did have the right URL.

Hm. Well now this is getting pretty peculiar. I bet the toll free number is a secret ploy to have me ‘prove’ my identity, only so they can use my SSN, mother’s maiden name, and childhood imaginary friend to completely clone my identity. So I do a search on that phone number.

And it shows up on AmericanExpress.com.

Uh. Oh.

Ms Singh at American Express asks me if I made that charge (uh, no) and tells me they are going to cancel my card and issue me a new number. Effective. Now.

{sigh}

Great. This happened to me in 2002 as well. I got off a plane from Massachusetts and got a letter the next day telling me that I had made a number of suspicious charges in a mall in Pennsylvania. About $4k was spent at Victoria Secrets, a hotel, Bloomingdales, and pottery barn. While I was in-flight no less.

So that means that later this week, I’ll have to spend another 1241298414 hours telling all the vendors I deal with that I have a new credit card, and blah blah blah.

What fun.