Obscanity: You'll know it when you see it

So… back in April I remember seeing a charge on my credit card for like, $4 and change. It was from Paypal, from a company called “SWAGVAULT.” I vaguely remember calling the company to figure out what the hell the charge was for, but I never got through to them. This was right around the time that I was dealing with some medical problems, and I was totally disoriented and not really wanting to deal with chasing around a $5 bill – so I wound up just assuming that it was from one of the comic book vendors on eBay, as I had recently bought a bunch of Buffy comics, all for around $4-$8.

Well, today I tried to add my credit card to PayPal, and it told me that my card number was already linked to another Paypal account! I figured, ah, maybe I linked it to my wife’s account when we were paying bills for the wedding… so I checked her account. No card. Then I thought, hm, maybe it’s on that other PayPal account I set up a long time ago. So I checked there too. I did find $90 I forgot I had on that account (SWEET! Hey, I ain’t complainin’!), but NO CARD.

So I called PayPal and got on the phone with some random person in a call center, and she told me that the account was linked to another email address. She couldn’t tell me which one, though.

Great. That helps! Blegh.

So she transferred me to somebody in the dispute resolution department, and he refused to tell me what email address the card was linked to.

GREAT! More help!

He was able to tell me the domain name of the account’s email address, at least, at which point I was just like, “Oh FUCK.” I don’t USE that mail service.

So I convinced him to at least tell me if there had been any charges, and if so, when, so I could look them up in my credit card statement. He was very, um, reticent about it. Don’t get me wrong; the guy was perfectly nice, and was really helpful and apologetic about not being able to give me more information – but these agents can be kind of coy when it comes to getting information out of them in the first place.

Luckily he was willing to suggest to me that I “might want to look” around March or April of this year. So I looked at March and April… nothing. Aha – but April’s charges are on the May statement. So I looked at May, and tada! There it was. That damned $4.xx charge from PAYPAL – SWAGVAULT.COM. FINALLY, the dam of information was broken – once I was able to identify the date and amount, he was able to give me the full name linked to the account.

That was the one and only charge made to my credit card, thankfully, but that didn’t stop me from calling and requesting a new credit card. Ironically, what started me off with all my credit card debt was a $250 fraudulent charge when I was 18 years old and making no money. (That seemed like a hell of a lot back then). They never did reverse that $250 charge, despite many attempts to report the fraud – but fortunately this time around they were more than happy to refund me my $4 and change and send me a new card.

The moral of the story… even if you do lots of online shopping, make sure you recognize each and every charge on your bill, because fraudulent charges can show up in any amount, and one scammed charge is one scam too many.

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