My Debit card was cloned and used in another state. (Minnesota)

The first attempted charge was for ~$115 at a supermarket (Rainbow Foods) and was declined even thought there was money in the account.

The second charge was for $40 at a gas station (Holiday Station) and went through.  My bank refunded the $40 and sent me a new card.

I called the local PD in Minn. and they said I need to file a report locally (Florida) first and then in the other cities where the charges/attempts were made.

I have exact locations and times of the transaction and attempted transaction.

Is it a waste of time to file since it's out of state and less than $500?  Am I just giving unnecessary paperwork to some detective that has a stack of files on his desk?

Fucking slags these fuckers are.  Get a fucking job assholes.

If this happened to me, and my bank issued me the refund and a new card I wouldn't bother calling the police. Just me though...

Police, no, I would just handle it through the fraud dept with my credit card, they can involve the police if they want.

Get rid of the debit card and use a credit card so that you are assured of better protection.

Also, I do have an ATM card but the debit feature is disabled.

Credit Cards are great if you are able to treat them as cash and pay them off every month.  The rewards are a nice bonus too....

Edit: My CC card numbers were recently stolen, and while it wasn't fun to deal with I didn't have to worry about the $300 in charges and they monitor your charges for abnormal behavior / charges also (more protection is good).  They caught it the same day before it even showed up online for me to see (I check my account almost daily)  

When this happened to me, my bank told me to file a polie report - so they would have record of it and maybe (someday) a case could be built if it was a larger ring of thieves.
I think I had to even give a copy of the report to the bank.

I told the cop that I would give him the money they took if he got me into a room with no cameras for 15 minutes with the dirtballs who did it.  He siad with the number of times he has had to take reports on CC theft, he would like 15 mins himself.

(My theft was years ago, I am from PA and my card was cloned in California and used at every ATM near the UCLA campus.)

Same thing happened to me last year. I didn't bother to report anything, I let the bank handle it.

Waste of your time IMO.  Debit cards are evil.  You came out alright this time, but get rid of that thing.  Replace with a ATM card (requires PIN) and just use a CC for purchases.

Depends on your bank's policies.  My debit card was compromised last year and the bank required a police report before they would refund the fraudulent charges.

my card company wrote off 20k in charges, so 500 bucks isn't a blip on the radar.
they even ordered a new card overnighted to them.

BUT I filed a police report anyway.
I used that to get free credit locks on my credit reports.
that prevents anyone from opening new credit in your name.

part of the reason I did it was due to the fact they managed to pull my credit report.

Yes. They won't be able to do much about it, but you need to get it documented.



A case number will go a long way with helping you repair your credit if more damage is uncovered later.


 

Yes, file a police report with your LOCAL police. No matter what they say, you don't have to file a report in all those other cities.

This is future protection against ID theft. You have a record of it with the police report. Look into getting ID theft insurance, through Zander insurance. Don't bother with outfits like lifelock, they won't do anything for you if your ID gets stolen. The Zander guys will actually do the legwork for you in clearing your name if something happens.

Now that said, never use your debit card as a debit card if you can help it. Use it as a CREDIT card. That means your PIN is not used.
If your card has the Visa or Mastercard logo on it, their own terms of service say you get the exact same protection as a credit card, as long as the transaction isn't used as a debit card.

If your card gets illegally used as a debit card, you'll have to go through the bank that issued it, and their policies can differ.

In my limited experience dealing with this, the police do not track this kind of thing down.




















 

I didn't with my debit card.  My bank told me that's up to me, but doesn't matter to them.

Wife got a call from her credit card company saying someone attempted to change the billing address and apparently has her date of birth and SSN.  She did credit pulling things and the bank said they'd extend the credit monitoring for free if she got a police report.  So she called the local police and the nice officer said, "Yup, same thing happened to me".

Why does this seem so common that it looks like these scammers got it easy?

I lost my card 5 or 6 years ago and within hours someone used it at a Walmart and Kmart.  To file a fraud report I had to file a police report.  The card fell out of my hoodie pocket and someone took advantage of the situation, so wasn't stolen or id theft, but still against the law to use it to buy shit.



I got to go the one of the police depts where I filed the report and watch the perp on KMart video.  I hate being inside police stations but they were cordial and nice.  Perp never got caught.  He bought a XBox 360