Long story short, my check card information was stolen (not the card itself) and some fraudulent purchases were made. BoA is in the process of restoring my money to my accounts, and I have talked to just about everybody I could get ahold of trying to push the investigation forward. I have very specific reasons to believe that my info was somehow obtained from a well known car rental company, and I have relayed those suspicions to the BoA fraud department, but EVERYONE I have talked to has done their best to block me from being involved in the investigation (if you could even call it that).

My question is this: is the bank actually going to pursue this, and will I ever hear back from them with any results? I would think it would be very simple to track the bastard(s) down, and I think my input would be helpful to the investigation, but so far all I get is the 'sit down and shut up' treatment when I try to ask questions. If you know anything about this stuff, I would love to hear it, because BoA won't tell me shit.

If the bank doesn't refer the matter to the police, then I doubt anything will be done on the criminal front.  As far as the investigation goes, I would back off and offer information when they ask for it.  Remember, it was your card that was used, so there's always some suspicion that you used it.

As an aside, one of the big reasons I use a credit card instead of a debit card is that in case of a problem like this, it's not my $ being stolen.  Many credit cards have a $0 liability, and your $ isn't tied up while they do the investigation.

Thats very true about the credit card, but one of those things I never would have thought about until something like this happens. I applied for one yesterday.

When the bank pays you back they become the victim, so its up to them if they want to prosecute, my unit has a very high success rate with prosecutions, but alot depends on the willingness of the bank to assist.

Weird I was just ripped off on one of my credit cards too recently.  I talked to the bank(also BoA) and they canceled my card and reissued me a new one. I too was wondering something about this, I actually very very rarely use my credit card and my charges started the day I used my card at an oil change place in snellville.  They bought some stuff on the internet, but I caught most of the transactions that were pending but it appears they made an online purchase from lowes.com then picked it up at the pleasant hill store the same day(which narrows down further the possible suspects since I know it definately wasn't stolen from some website).  I'm kind of tempted to go to that lowes store and talk to a manager, since their site says they need ID to pick up credit card orders from the internet.  I wonder if they have video cameras that would show who picked up. I doubt they would let me watch any security videos they have but damn it would be interesting if it was one of the people from the oil place.  These people are in a position to sting a lot of people and I'd like to see them burned.

It was scary in hindsight too because I use my debit card a lot, but was kind of low on cash until pay day so I put it on charge.  Had I used debit this could of been much much more frustrating.  I now will not use my debit card for purchases anymore, I started making myself go to the bank to get pocket cash.

T hey don't do anything about it.  A good friend of mine had his debit card number swiped, it was then used at several stores as a credit card including a tune up clinic for auto work.  What an easy slam dunk, the tune up clinic would have his tag number....no one would do anything about it.

Your friend needs to file an identity theft report with the agency that provides law enforcement for his jurisdiction. Very rarely are we ever contacted by a bank (never that I can recall) to file an identity theft complaint on behalf of the acct holder. Our agency has pretty good success on most ID fraud cases. Tell him/her when they file the report with the police they will need entire account numbers, dates of the fraudulent purchases/amounts/ and locations if possible. The easiest way to do this is to provide a copy of all the billing statements which have the charges on them, and highlight the charges.

Hope this helps.

Most of the credit card and debit card thefts get pushed back to the merchant. The banks could care less––they still get their processing fee plus they get to add a fraud surcharge on to the merchants' account. It winds up costing the consumers more, not the banks. In some ways it is good, most merchants don't check ID for even large purchases.

Credit card fun

I travel alot to S. FL.  Several years ago I had my AMEX card number stolen 3 times in a single month.  Amex was pretty good about it.  They replaced my card 3 times in that month.  One time even going so far as to courier one to my house at 11:00 on a Saturday night.  I never heard anything about the fraud.  They did tell me one time when it was stolen, the number was used that same afternoon in Tampa to buy $75.00 in fuel.  Another time somebody used the card to order some clothes from Lane Bryant and had them shipped to the little Havana section of Mia.  Also had a fraudster out of NJ attempt to start opening CC accounts in my name.  I personally looked into that situation and literally had the guys address.  I called the local PD in NJ about it and they would not do anything.  After that I said to hell with it, it's the banks problemo.

This was a few years ago, and we (I was with him) went to the Gwinnett County Police headquarters, talked to a detective who pretty much blew us off.  It was really sad that they weren't interested in a slam dunk felony.  If I had been a detective that thug would have been behind bars in a few hours.