I got scammed: here’s how to avoid it happening to you
Every Thursday night my calendar reminds me to do my weekly financial review. This is my way of ensuring that it never goes undone. I do it on Thursday nights because I like to go into the weekend knowing what I have available to spend. Since I tend to go grocery shopping on Fridays, having a clear picture of what’s available in the budget is helpful. Weekends are also when we do a lot of activities, so it’s great information going into the weekend.
Last week, I sat down to do my usual review. I always start by opening my tracking sheet, which I keep in a Google Sheet so both my husband and I can access it. I then go to our checking account and record any transactions and reconcile the spending. From there, I go to our credit card accounts and do the same review. When I opened our credit card account, I had a feeling I don’t have too often anymore – I felt scared. I didn’t know how our bill could be what it was because I have a general idea of what it always is (I’ve written about how to avoid the credit card statement scaries here). As I started to go through the transactions, this is what I found:
My husband and I confirmed neither of us bought anything on TikTok (they tried scamming the wrong millennials here – neither of us have TikTok accounts and this is way more than our discretionary money each month). We realized this was fraud and our card had been used by someone else. I immediately reported the fraud through my credit card company and the card was cancelled. Within 24 hours this amount was refunded to our card.
The important thing to highlight is this: If I didn’t track my expenses, I wouldn’t have caught this. It wasn’t so large of an amount that I would have noticed it if I wasn’t already tuned in to what our bill should be. I’m afraid this happens a lot. In 2022, this type of fraud we experienced (where a card wasn’t present, i.e. online or on the phone), accounted for $5.72 billion dollars of transactions in the United States.
I’ve written about the benefits (and perils) of credit cards before. Credit cards have some benefits and afford you some rights, so it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to use them. However, if you use a card for spending, it is critical that you review it and track your spending regularly. A credit card’s version of tracking won’t alert you to a problem – this spending would have likely just been lumped into the category of “shopping.” You must do your own tracking.
Tracking your spending has numerous benefits – the largest being the mindfulness that comes from knowing where you’re spending and that you’re spending in a way that matches what you care about. Tracking your spending also means that you don’t let these sorts of things go unchecked – a few of these fraudulent expenses each year can add up to a lot.
If you aren’t already tracking your expenses, it’s always a good time to start. If you’d like my tracking template to get you started, you can get it here.