Re: American and meg stripe..
Not entirely true.
I had my debit card skimmed locally (in the NE US) right before I left on a month long trip to New Zealand. I suspect that they overhead me discussing travel plans and knew they would have a decent window of opportunity.
Even though my card is set up to notify of any and all use, the first I heard was an email from a rewards account congratulating me on using my debit card at a restaurant chain in Boston. I logged on to my bank account and found over $1200 in charges over the 3 days that I was traveling to NZ.
I was able to cancel the card and dispute all the charges (pretty easy to do when I had evidence I was literally 12,000 miles away at the time with the card in my possession.
BUT, when I got back I had a mountain of envelopes in the post - each one containing a form to be filled in for each disputed charge - in my case, 26 of them.
The I took the completed forms to the bank to be faxed (yes faxed) to the claims department I asked if they need me to help with the police report since it should be fairly easy to trace the people from our local grocery store (where the card had been skimmed) to Boston and the specific starbucks, restaurants, gas stations, etc. They told me they don't even file a police report for less than $5000 and even then most times there's zero follow up.
Now I use apple pay at the grocery store and have pretty much stopped using cards anywhere I can avoid it - back to cash for me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
