Credit Card Chaos

We use our credit card a great deal. In fact, we use it for nearly every purchase we make and then pay it off every month. I shop online, pay for groceries and gas, buy gifts, and use the credit card to pay for all of it. It's simple and normally works very well for us, except when someone tries to use our credit card, causing our financial institution to shut it down, cancel it and re-issue a new card, which is exactly what's happened, not once, but twice in the last 14 months.

My husband is currently on a business trip for a couple of weeks, and while he can use his government travel card for expenses related to the job, he cannot use it for personal reasons. He's in a location where he has access to some beautiful rugs he could purchase and bring back, only he doesn't have a personal credit card to pay for them.

I nearly embarrassed myself at the commissary when I went grocery shopping and realized at the checkout that I couldn't use the credit card. Luckily I had enough cash in my wallet to cover it. I have another credit card I can use, but I typically don't carry it with me because it's not widely accepted in Europe.

We'd placed an online order for some computer software, but it hadn't come in at the time that our credit card was cancelled. The company with which we placed the order doesn't bill the card until the item is shipped. Now the order can't go through because our financial institution can't and won't charge a credit card that has been cancelled. We'll have to start all over with the ordering process. And I wanted that software like yesterday.

It's great that our financial institution caught this scam in progress and were able to shut down our account before any real damage was done. I know there are people who have had to deal with stolen identity issues for years. I'm grateful we're not among those people.

I'm just hoping our new credit card comes soon as we've made some travel plans this month and really would like to have the ease and convenience of using the card rather than carrying large amounts of cash. As I said before, my personal credit card isn't widely accepted, so I'm not sure it would even be worth carrying along. This whole situation is so frustrating and inconvenient!

Why do people think it's okay to try to take what isn't theirs? The very people responsible for these credit card scams would probably be angry beyond belief if someone were to treat them in the same manner.