The $343.17 Mishap

Late last week, I received an envelope from a bank we no longer deal with. I opened it on the weekend and at first thought that someone had made a $343.17 purchase on our supposedly defunct credit card. Then I saw the minus sign and understood that it was a credit.

That could only mean one thing:  that I had paid off the wrong credit card — the defunct Visa B instead of the current Visa A card. Silly me! I do these sorts of things on occasion.

We don’t even have that physical card since I shredded the last one because we don’t use it at all. Other than that card lingering on somehow, we don’t even have an account with that bank. 

It gets confusing.

I had mistakenly paid on the number of my old Visa card from Bank B that lingered in my bill paying list, but the verification snail mail came to Sue on her number. I learned that my card number is totally defunct, but the bank somehow still knew enough to credit Sue’s card number because the two cards had been joined, and Sue had been the primary cardholder.

Confused yet? Wait there is more.

We had no way to access the funds because we had no account with that bank. We just had a credit card on the books but no physical card in actual fact.

We would require a physical card, so that we could make purchases with it until we used up the $343.17. At lest that seemed like the best workaround.  

A phone call to the credit card division of the bank could not sort it out because we were calling from a new phone number than the one they last had a record of, and at time we couldn’t even for sure recall the old number enough to verify it.

We would have to go to a physical bank, get authenticated somehow, and only then call the credit card number back to get issued a new card. 

Thanks goodness, there is a physical bank in town. There wasn’t when we moved her, which is why we changed banks in the first place.

But first to find out old phone numbers. Was it our ancient number from Sarnia or our somewhat less ancient number from here?  I took a stab at our ancient Sarnia number and called Shauna to verify. She did. I was correct. (By the way, I still remember my boyhood number from 63 years ago and my friend’s number too. I wasn't quite so sure of our number from 20 years ago, but my memory did not fail completely.)

Meanwhile, what was our old number from here before we abandoned our landline, probably 8 to 10 years ago? Sue found old paperwork, and we were pretty sure that one of the two numbers (Sarnia or old number here) would be what the bank had on file. 

Phew! When he got to the bank we found that we were correct. The former landline was on file, and that got us started.

Much ID verification later, the teller worked us through authentication and set us up with the banking app on the spot and a top secret password to actually use once we logged in using Sue’s phone. We had to take the phone home to log in because Sue would require her email password to log into the app (why? we don’t understand), and she didn’t know it on the spot.

At home, she was able to complete the installation of the banking app, and anfter using the temporary password that the bank had given her, she set up a new, permanent password and so on and so forth.

Finally, she was fully authenticated and was only then able to call in to the credit card division and request a new credit card.

The new card will arrive in approximately ten days and will be a new number. We will then be able to use it to draw down the $343.17 by using it in place of the cards that we normally use.

The money was never permanently lost, but it was quite a foofaraw to get access to it.

In case you are wondering, yes my dears, I have deleted that particular credit card from my bill paying list to prevent myself from making that mistake again.