Just before Christmas my Canadian bank (RBC) texted me to say that they'd blocked a suspicious transaction. In the text message they included a phone number that I could call to get more information about the incident. It felt fishy but out of curiosity I called it and they wanted to ask me my "security questions" to confirm my identity.

I hung up and instead called the actual number on the back of the card. The whole thing was real, the bank had actually contacted me by text and sent me a follow up phone number.

Truly I don't understand what they're thinking sometimes.

I had my card paused SEVERAL times over the years for sketchy stuff like getting gas at the same gas station I always get gas at or buying a delivery of pizza on a Big Name Company's website. Then, two times in the past year, someone bought thousands of dollars in iPhones, rental apartments, and gasoline on my card on a different body of land than the one I live on thousands of miles away in rapid succession and each of the two times it was ME who caught it because of notifications I have setup! Fraud departments at banks and card companies are fucking useless.

This experience actually says more about what's been going on at that car wash you visited...

Another story: I was abroad, and someone got my card details and made purchases for thousands of $ in a different part of the country that I don't usually visit and certainly doesn't purchase there stuff for that amount of money.

Nobody even cared, but a payment I made for 2 euros wasn't accepted becuase reasons, and every online purchase needed some authorization.

When I called them, they said they'll look into the purchases. Well, they cancelled the purchases quite fast, but the surrealism of it all...

It is very common to test stolen cards at gas stations (relatively anonymous and available, and easy to just drive away if the card fails). If that car wash was attached to a gas station, fraud detection algorithms have a tendency for false positives at gas stations because of that.

On the flip side, it's somewhat difficult to buy an expensive TV without showing up on camera at some point. As methods for monetizing stolen cards go, it's pretty uncommon.

It's kinda like how Linux's RNG code has no special case to keep from outputting 123456789.

Seriously?!?

Everybody knows that's not a random number.