Weekend woes...

I pay all of my bills online. My reason is simple, I never put anything in my mailbox. Right now, in my little wicker tray thingy on my counter, I have probably five envelopes ready to go in the mail, that have been there for at least a week and a half. For whatever reason, I never actually remember to put them in the mail. I could get up from this seat right now, and by the time I plodded to the kitchen, I would be headed to the fridge for a snack instead of to put the mail in the box.

Anyway, this weekend may be the one thing to get me to using the good ole postal service again. My father in law called me on Saturday and said that someone from our bank called his house looking for us. We have never lived with my father in law, and we keep our number unlisted. Of course, he gave them our number. They never called us.

My father in law did call me to tell me this, so of course, my suspicions were raised. So I tried to get online to my bank account, but the site was "under maintenance", so I couldn't log on. I live about four minutes from a bank branch, so I decided to go check our account balances at the ATM. When I tried to use the ATM, I got a "transaction denied". I tried again, same thing.

BIG SMILES!! or not...

So, after the website was back up on Sunday, I checked our account, and yes, there were three charges, all to the same merchant, all for the same amount, taken out of our account. And since we bank with a small local bank (because Dave Ramsey says to), we couldn't get hold of a live person until this morning.

Turns out, the nice folks at VISA placed a block on our card, and thankfully, no more charges were allowed.
The question is, will we be able to recover the $430 + we lost??

Word of advice... never purchase software online. Don't even download trial software, no matter who says it's safe. Apparently this is a vendor for lots of software products, and someone is stealing under their name, Digital River. I think I may be hanging up my online bill pay boots for a while anyway...

So I'm off to the bank, filing disputes, getting our card officially shut off, and requesting new cards... fuuuuun.