Stolen credit card info

[Anonymous]

How often have your credit cards been compromised? At least twice a year or so, we get the alert that our card has been used elsewhere, and they are clearly not our charges. We only have one card, it's a chip card, and we use it for almost everything including online, but always Amazon or regular reputable stores. Why is this happening all the time? Is it just us, or common?

[Anonymous]

It's common.

It happens for a lot of reasons, in a lot of ways. Skimming, data breaches, employee fraud - often at the data processor for a store, etc. It also happens that banks will proactively shut off an account if it shares similarity with other compromised accounts.

Chip solves the problem (sort of) in retail environments, but mag stripe trans still exist in many places and all online transactions are at risk, reputable or otherwise.

[Anonymous]

Ours have actually been stolen maybe 3-4 times (where there are actual fraudulent charges.). They've been replaced by the card companies as a caution several times after big data breaches (target, Home Depot, etc).