We've had this happen about six times now. The first time was probably in 1997 or '98. The CC issuers have always been accommodating. The worse thing was most recently when they (Citi MC) wanted us to contact the seller and have the seller cancel the account which the thief had created to make multiple purchases with our credit card number. The seller did not want to close the account because we could not provide the password on it. (Duh?) Well closing that account is moot now, as the CC account has been changed over to a new number. Unfortunately, that is my most used card, so waiting for its replacement we did miss a few days use and maybe a few cents of rewards money. That's not a big deal, obviously. I guess it might have been a big deal if that were my only card and I needed to buy air tickets, rent a car, or buy a houseful of carpet or something.
I do feel concerned that maybe if this keeps happening to us, the CC issuers will cease acknowledging that it was a thief, not us, making the purchases. It has happened on different cards over the years, all of them via internet. We think that our card numbers have just been randomly hit.
Oh, actually I just remembered that one replacement card was missing from the mail just before the fraudulent charges stopped. Fortunately, we had reported it "missing/never arrived" just a few days before the charges began. So this one might not have been just a matter of random number generation.
All in all, I give all our CC companies an B++ for handling it, but American Express gets an A+.
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