Lin calls about an hour ago and asks me what I have bought lately. Gasoline and breakfast yesterday. Before that? Groceries last week. Why?

Seems he had the urge to check our online bank statement, and there was a $25 pending charge from Yahoo sitting there. I assured him I certainly didn’t give Yahoo any money for anything. I mean, I’ve been trying to put off going grocery shopping until after payday, because I am in a panic about the financial situation. I haven’t been buying anything that isn’t absolutely needed for existence. I haven’t even been buying Dr Pepper! Why the hell would I be giving Yahoo $25 out of the household account? I wouldn’t.

Lin calls back. He’s talked to someone at the phone number associated with the strange charge (at Yahoo). Well, the charge wasn’t on his card number, so he needs my card number. I reassure him I did not use my card to buy anything from Yahoo, and that I don’t go around using that card on the internet all willy-nilly … or off the internet either. He believed me, of course, because he knows I wouldn’t lie about something like that, I don’t tend to go mad with money that isn’t in my mad money account, and on the rare occasion that I do spend money on myself from that account, I inform me, usually beforehand. I give him my card number and wait.

He calls back again. It was a charge to start Yahoo Voice phone service on my card. Well, no, there is no reason at all I would pay Yahoo for crappy PC phone service. I would officially have to be out of my head. Anyway, Lin sorted it out with the person at Yahoo, and they agreed he hadn’t been the one to set up the service. They credited our account the $25 charge, and they canceled the phone service of whoever it was that had used my card. Hope they liked that one day of service they got.

What’s annoying is that we have no idea who did it, where they live, or how they got my bank card number. Yahoo insisted they had no information at all. I know they must have something other than my bank card number, but at the moment, it isn’t worth it to argue with them about it. We aren’t going to get a lawyer to investigate a $25 fraudulent charge. So anyway, we have no idea where the weak link happened and how someone got my card number. I have thought of all the places I have ever used my card, which doesn’t get used often at all, and really, I hardly use it anywhere. HEB. Walgreens. Amazon. Hobby Lobby. Time Warner. DirectNic. A Small Orange. Livejournal. Papajohn’s Pizza. The local yarn store two years ago. Two gas stations – one by my house and one by my mom’s house. Sonic. Joann’s Fabrics about two years ago. The utility companies. That’s it. Any other spending I do is on my own bank account, the list for which is even shorter. I don’t buy a lot of things, and I am a total creature of habit about where I do buy things. Lin uses his card all over the place, both online and off, all the time, and his card number doesn’t get compromised. I barely use my at all, and mine is the one that ends up with a fraudulent charge on it. This is annoying me.

At any rate, Lin already stopped by the bank and canceled my card. Now I get to sit around for a week waiting for my new one. I guess I now have the perfect excuse not to go grocery shopping this week. That sucks, because I was going to go today before Lin called with all this news. I guess we’ll have to go together this weekend. That’ll be hell, but we will need some things by then … like toilet paper.

I feel for anyone this might happen to that doesn’t check their account statement online all the time or doesn’t have that option. It was set up to be a recurring, re-filling phone card type of thing, and when that $25 would have gone through and been used up, it would have charged another and another and another, until we were broke. As it was, Lin caught it while the charge was still pending. Very, very lucky.

This week is not going so well yet. I hope it improves. I mean, I really, really hope no more comes of this. I am completely stressed out now about the bank account. I guess I have something to obsess over for a while.