It was late when I left the hospital last night and I was starving so I stopped at Burger King for a quick bite. I handed my card over to pay and the guy said it was declined. I was totally confused and paid him in cash thinking it was just their machine or something. Today when I went to McDonald's and grabbed a Frappe, my card was again declined. What???
I again paid in cash and pulled into a parking spot and called the bank.
They immediately told me my card had been suspended and tranferred me to Fraud Services. I had to answer several minutes of questions to confirm it was truly me and then was asked if I had recently paid for membership to an online senior dating service. Shocked I told them "NO". According to our spending history our bank did not feel that it was a purchase I would make so when the transaction came through they immediately suspended my card thinking my card had been compromised. We are praising God that we have such a great bank and they caught this immediately before anymore fraudulent charges could be made to our account!
We have seen so many of our church people be affected by people trying to scam them recently. God says that money is the root of all evil and it is so true. Everyone wants more money so it is easy to prey on these people by offering them money that is not real. One of our ladies called me and told me she had recieved an email saying she won the lottery. They sent her a check and asked her not to tell the bank it was for the lottery but was instead an insurance check. I immediately told her this did not sound right and that it sounded like a scam and I advised her not to cash it. She was upset with me and took it to the bank where they explained to her that it was indeed a scam. A young man in our church received a call from the government saying he had qualifed for a grant and if he would give them his account number they would deposit the funds within 15 minutes. Luckily he questioned the man on the phone and found several things that did not sound right and did not give them his account number. This too was a scam. We have even had several people try to scam our church recently. One where we were sent a hand written bill for 350 light bulbs that even had the name of one of our deacons on it. When I called the number on the paper the man kept telling me that the lightbulbs should arrive any day by UPS. Not only had we not ordered lightbulbs but the man on the phone would not directly answer my questions. When I asked him if this was a scam he hung up on me. My husband also recieved a email to the church from a "business owner" who, since she was doing so well in her business, promised God she'd give a large sum of money to other churches and said her pastor had told her of our church. My husband emailed her a couple of times but thought it was fishy when she would not tell him her church or Pastor's name. It too turned out to be a scam!
People are becoming very bold and trying to trick others out of money anyway they can. I encourage people to be careful when they are contacted by email or by phone by someone saying they won, been chosen to receive or earned money, especially if they never entered or signed up for something. There are many good sites online about internet and phone fraud and I advise everyone to check out any money opportunites by going to http://www.snopes.com/fraud/topscams.asp ,
or one of the many other sites that exploit the many scams out there.
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