Since late August, there has been a firestorm of difficulties with fraudulent debit card transactions over at Ally Bank. I have been watching the megathread over at Reddit.
Yesterday I realized the actual fraud is only half the issue… the other half or two-thirds is the slow and sometimes poor customer service. I’m not OK with that, I don’t believe in rewarding poor service. Therefore, I’m in the process of changing my checking — all of my billpays, ACHs, and direct deposits — over to my local credit union where I already have savings and a safe deposit box. At least if I have any kind of serious problem I can walk into the lobby and talk to a real human being face-to-face about it.
I will keep Ally Savings, it’s paying 2%, and the fraud apparently isn’t hitting savings, I have no debit card attached to my savings.
Some people think its an inside job at Ally, and the thieves were given (or stole) sequential blocks of debit card numbers. I mean, once you know a sequential block of valid cards runs from, say, 1111 3333 5555 7777, 1111 3333 5555 7778, 1111 3333 5555 7779, 1111 3333 5555 7780, etc it’s super easy to just randomly try different expiration dates and 3-digit security codes (1000 combos), and the valid dates run 10/22 to maybe 10/27, only 61 different ones. You’re going to have a lot of success cracking that weak safe. You will hit every 61,000 times. A computer will play that game all day and all night, it would be like printing money. Off it goes to Russia / China / Iran / N. Korea / Nigeria / etc. !