Strangest card issue

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Jan 23, 2016, 12:43 pm

durberville

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Strangest card issue

I have an SPG AMEX (US). The original card didn't come in the mail, so AMEX couriered me a new one. Made a couple purchases over the week while in Canada, one for $USD 1,000, another for $USD 50. However, those charges never showed as pending, even when I called AMEX. It was weird. So today I made a $CAD 1 charge at a pharmacy. On the receipt, the ending number is "1". My card number ends in "2."

I called AMEX. I've never had a card ending in that number. They can't find the charges anywhere. They don't know what's going on. On hold for a top-level person now...

I'm thinking when they made the new card, they encoded the chip with a different number than my account number... perhaps someone else's number?

Jan 23, 2016, 12:46 pm

mia

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Quote:

Originally Posted by durberville

I... those charges never showed as pending...?

This part is normal. Foreign transactions are not shown online as pending.

Jan 23, 2016, 12:47 pm

durberville

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Quote:

Originally Posted by mia

This is normal. Foreign transactions are not shown online as pending.

I called AMEX and they don't see the charges pending, not just an online problem.

Further, on the receipt, the ending number is different.

Jan 23, 2016, 1:04 pm

durberville

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Spoke to someone. They said they have no clue how this happened, they've never heard of it before. They are going to have to do an investigation.

Jan 24, 2016, 5:06 pm

beckoa

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Wirelessly posted (beckoa's BB: Mozilla/5.0 (BB10; Kbd) AppleWebKit/537.35+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.3.2.858 Mobile Safari/537.35+)

Please keep us updated. Good for you on catching this ^

Jan 27, 2016, 5:01 pm

durberville

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Update: AMEX has confirmed that the charges were being posted to someone else's account.

Jan 27, 2016, 5:15 pm

djk7

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Quote:

Originally Posted by durberville

Update: AMEX has confirmed that the charges were being posted to someone else's account.

That must be the "Super Ultra Plutonium Card". They don't give those out too freely!

Jan 27, 2016, 5:25 pm

seawolf

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Strangest card issue

Was it a chip transaction?

Jan 27, 2016, 5:38 pm

durberville

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Quote:

Originally Posted by seawolf

Was it a chip transaction?

Yes. Chip + Sig.

Jan 27, 2016, 10:31 pm

#10

gooselee

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Quote:

Originally Posted by durberville

Update: AMEX has confirmed that the charges were being posted to someone else's account.

Wow. I wonder if the chips from the two cards had somehow gotten mixed up (or encoded out of order or something) during the production process.

Good on you for noticing and following up!