Personal Story

Before the age of “tap and go” credit cards (which has caused an almost hilarious amount of thefts that credit card companies should have easily seen coming), stealing a credit card was much more difficult. You either needed to hack into an Internet site or steal the card from a wallet. Those were essentially the only two ways to use someone else’s credit card.

Unless you did one thing: write down the credit card numbers and have an employee enter the numbers in the machine by hand without the card. Few employees will do this willingly, as without a card on hand it is very clearly theft (no one carries a credit card number without the card), so for an employee to be willing to do this they have to purposely be allowing someone to steal from the store they work for. This happened to me.

The card was in my pocket and it was not a card used on any Internet websites, which means that at some point some one that saw the card wrote down the numbers and expiration date, took it to a store, and had an employee that they presumably knew let them steal my information. Now, most credit card companies helped to refund money if your card is stolen, and this credit card was no different. Indeed, it was the credit card company that caught the theft and helped cancel my card before the thefts could continue.

But clearly this is also a problem with the company where my credit card was charged – they had an employee on staff that was letting people steal from there store. So I called the help line and let them know of this problem. They responded by saying to my surprise, that it wasn’t important to them.

They said they didn’t really know what they could do, and didn’t feel the need to investigate the issue, since they didn’t lose any money in the process. It doesn’t take a customer satisfaction expert to understand why this is a problem. It’s not that my opinion of the store necessarily changed (although it did a little bit).

It’s that I was giving the company a great deal of feedback simply by this one report: I was letting them know of an employee that is stealing. I was letting them know of a problem with their customer satisfaction. I was letting them know of an issue with customer service.

One persons’ opinion is only one person’s opinion, but that does not mean that a great deal of information can’t be found in that single opinion. It was curious that they would dismiss my information so easily, but I suppose as long as I got my money back, it didn’t really matter to me.