I have banked with Chase for 25 years. I decided to get a home equity loan three months ago with another bank because Chase doesn’t offer home equity loans. This bank gave me a debit card. I didn’t need it. I didn’t activate it. The activation sticker is still on it. The whole purpose of the required checking account with this other bank is to do auto payments to my home equity loan. I transfer $200 per month from Chase to this checking account and my home equity payment is auto-deducted. All is well. Until yesterday when I look at my bank balance and there has been a $152.47 purchase at Amazon with my debit card. I just disputed the transaction. But how could that happen? I live alone so nobody had access to my card. It’s never been activated. Its numbers have never been out of my drawer. I don’t understand how ‘someone’ could have purchased something on Amazon with it… they would’ve had to know my address and my ZIP code for billing. None of my other financial cards are impacted. When I disputed the transaction, they said they are going to send me out a new card and I told them I didn’t need it, but they are still doing it. Any advice as to how this even happened and how do I help make it not happen again?
And in case this question comes up: I did double-check my Amazon payment purchase history and this checking account debit card number is not listed as a payment option nor has it been used on any orders.
You have to lock the debit card. Despite not activating it, some (many) banks will auto-activate a new card on first use (which defeats the purpose of activation, IMO).
Does this bank have a mobile app or website option for locking the debit card?
@Whitney
I will check into that. Thank you. But how did someone get my credit/debit card number to make the purchase? If they didn’t get it from me, doesn’t that mean they got it through the bank… through a data breach or something? Thinking this through… the bank only puts the last four digits of a credit card or debit card number in a customer’s portal. To get all of the numbers, wouldn’t there have to be a data breach?
@Whitney
Totally agree. So it doesn’t happen again (I hope), if there is no intention of using your debit card, go to your app and lock it immediately after receiving it.
At my bank (PNC), for me to be able to better access online banking and use Zelle, they pretty much required me to open a debit card. I had ATM card problems 30 years ago and vowed not to have another one until recently, which I immediately locked upon receipt.
Can you see if any new cards have been issued from the checking account? I had a situation years ago where a person stole my identity and was able to convince the bank to issue them a new debit card to an address not related to the account.
@Tru
When I was disputing the transaction and the bank representative was asking for my information, I asked her if this card was the only one issued, and she said yes… and had they issued another one, it would have had a different number and CVC number - just like the new one that they are sending out on Monday will.
@Ode
That’s what they told me as well, no other cards. We only found out from the police report months later that they’d issued a new temporary physical card from a branch location. The situation was very similar, though not for a loan. It was a business bank account used solely for wires - the debit card wasn’t activated and sat in a drawer.
@Tru
Interesting. The bank representative asked me which branch issued my card and I told her none - that I opened the home equity line and checking account online. Maybe a branch did do that, just as you described.
Hope you find out though. It was really bothering me knowing the card never left my drawer. I thought I had an attack from the inside 
.