Credit card fraud

I logged on to internet banking to pay my mortgage on the 7th of May 2007. That's when I generally pay my credit card bill too. You know the way these sites are really clunky and sometimes ask you to enter your transfer amounts in cents instead of Euros, so that E50 has to be entered as 5000? And you know the way I live in a non-decimal currency? All of this contributed to it taking a good while before I registered that Euro2,600 was a disturbing sum of money to have spent in less than a month on a credit card. I'm dozy enough that I spent a little while trying to remember where I'd spent Euro 2,600 (that meal in the Patio? Maybe in Costa Rica airport? I hardly use my credit card!) before I realised that clearly I had been robbed. Violated. Taken advantage of. I started to cry.

I pegged it to my house, which is near my office, to get the number of my credit card for cancellation purposes, and to confirm that the card wasn't where it always is in my bedroom. The card was where it always is in my bedroom. Somebody had faked my card without ever holding it for more than 5 minutes.

Further investigations, since I cancelled it, have been incredibly slow, resulting in theory after theory. On the internet you can only see the last 20 transactions (with my bank anyway); and those I could see had all been registered on the same day (May 4th). They were in petrol stations and fast food outlets which are ubiquitous in Honduras. And they were for squeenchy little amounts. One was for 18 cent. At first I figured that the transactions were going through like phone bookings, simply quoting the card number and expiry date: I imagined a network of complicit petrol station goons allowing their mates to use card details they knew to be stolen. But how did that work? Why would anybody steal credit card details just to buy bottles of water and fast food? Where were the flights to Miami, the laptop computers and ipods, the saleable technology? That's when my flatmate's boyfriend came up with his gruesome theory that the card was being used to finance a kidnapping. I think the kidnapping was an embellishment; but I think he's spot on with the nature of the use: someone forged my card, and now it's their petty cash fund to finance their criminal activities.

The theory was backed up when the bank statements arrived. The first 8 transactions are in Guatemala, city and up the border with Honduras towards the Carribean coast where the narcotraficantes hang out. Then over the border to Cortes, the neighbouring province, where the Honduran narcotraficantes run. Over and back, over and back, stopping mostly in motels and fast food chains with just one massive hit of E1,260 for electrical goods (why was my credit card not automatically stopped then?). They overran my credit limit by 20%, and it kept going. For 2 weeks, until finally I noticed and cancelled it. Trickle by trickle, the payments are still going through.

So the good news: the bank recognises the fraud, and I'll get my money back. So now I don't need to cry any more, and I'm very intrigued.

I went to the police today to make my denuncia, and open the investigation. It was hilarious. It took the woman QUITE some time to figure out that the Euro is a very valuable currency, and that it's worth considerably more than Honduran lempiras (25 times more, to be precise). She insisted that I dictate my credit card statement to her line by line, since her computer "doesn't have a calculator" (I tried to show her where it was, but she didn't want me to see the game of free cell open on the screen, so she wouldn't let me near it); and she wasn't able to use the photocopier. I have an appointment with an investigator on Thursday.

And I genuinely, sincerely, can't wait!