My first denunciation

I went to the Mossos in Sant Cugat today to denounce whoever has been using my inactivated credit card.

The place was pretty quite. The guy in front of me was asking if he was wanted for anything. They looked in all their databases and came to the conclusion that it didn’t look like he had any arrest warrants pending. He didn’t seem to be very happy about this and left with a scowl on his face.

Once past the receptionist, I sat down in the office of one of the Mossos, who looked at my file, then went to Google on his computer to see what the credit card charges were for. Eventually we agreed that it was definitely for the tunnels. Not sure why it was relevant, but perhaps he was just bored.

After that, he filled in a rather extensive form letter saying that the card was stolen, etc. I signed the denunciation and another form informing me that I had a right to lawyer etc, and that was that.

I asked him if they ever bothered to track down the people that use stolen credit cards in the tunnels. After all, they do have cameras taking pictures of every car that passes. If they can justify sending a photo-radar fine based on the picture of the car, you’d think they could send out a fine for using a stolen credit card. But no, he mentioned that the company that runs the tunnels uses an ancient IT system that would be too expensive to upgrade for doing something like that.

I think the other factor is that unless you steal more that 400 euros, there’s zero consequences if you are caught, so the police doesn’t really waste any effort on it.

Losing a credit card in Spain

I recently had the wonderful experience of losing a credit card. Actually I didn’t really lose it. It turns out that my bank never actually had the correct street address in their files, which resulted in somebody else receiving all our bank statements for the last two years. Stupid me thought we just had switched to paperless billing.

Finally this came to a head when my bank tried to send me a new credit card, as the old one had expired. After two weeks, I got an email telling me I should come to the office to sign for the card. So I walk to the bank office and sign the documents and then ask them for my card. “We sent it to your address,” they said. I hadn’t received it, so we checked the address they had on file. It was wrong.

We tried to correct it, but the computer kept “fixing” the address back to some other street with a similar name. Finally, I was inspired to try the Spanish spelling of our street, which turned out to be the “official” name. Looks like our city government decided to go and change all the street signs to Catalan without actually changing the official name.

So now we had it fixed, and my new card arrived in the mail a couple days later.

Then last week I get a panicked email from my bank manager… “Did you use your previous card to pay for the toll in the tunnels?” Oh shit. I had heard this story before from a friend of mine. He actually had to close his account and switch banks because somebody kept using his stolen bank card to pay for the tolls.

Turns out that tolls and parking lots don’t do online validation of credit cards and thus don’t know about stolen or non-activated cards. For some reason, instead of just rejecting the charge, banks are nice enough to charge the customer anyway. How they get away with something so obviously wrong is beyond me.

Apparently the only way to get around this is for me to go to the “Comisaria de Policia” and file a report stating that the card is lost and that I never had it. Once I have this in hand, I can go back to the bank and have them cancel the charges on my account. In addition, I need to keep monitoring the account until 2015, when the card expires, since there’s nothing stopping them from continuing to use it.