I’m not sure how or why this happened. I’m not calling it identity theft as of yet because I don’t have enough to go on. But certainly there has been an unauthorized transaction out of my account in the amount of $18. I assume I nipped this in the bud but either way my credit union (CU) is aware of this odd withdrawal.

How did I notice? I went to the ATM today to check my balance as it is payday and noticed that $18 was missing. After the initial thought of “What the….” I went home and checked our HR site and my pay was accurate, so it wasn’t a mistake on my check. The next step was to call my CU.

After dropping the boys off at school, I call over to my CU and they tell me that a withdrawal was made by WTS (Web Transaction Services), a third party payment service in the amount $18. Of course now I have questions as I never authorized any transaction aside from my automatic payments for my auto insurance and Netflix. On top of that, I've never heard of WTS.

I hopped in the car on my way to work and stopped by my CU to try and get to the bottom of this mystery. The mystery broadens after the lovely lady at the CU goes into my account and digs up the details on the transaction which includes WTS' phone number. I call WTS and they say I had signed up to be a member for some psychic website service. Not true.

The woman at WTS does quickly unsubscribe me. During the call I tell her I never contacted you nor authorized any payment as the WTS rep starts asking questions. First one was, "Do you have an AOL email address?" I replied back, “I haven't in about 10 years” then the woman asks me if I had ever had this certain password. I can’t remember the line of letters and numbers, but it seemed to me like it was one of those temporary passwords you get when you forget yours and have to retrieve one through the back door, for example 1L5PJ3XX. The answer was "no." I would never have chosen a password so hard to remember.

I guess WTS is sending my info to their fraud department. I’m supposed to get paperwork from them and hopefully a refund. My CU said if a refund doesn’t come to me within a week, they’ll have me sign an affidavit stating I never made that transaction and the CU will give back the cash.

This isn’t a Facebook hack, nor even a Myspace issue from way back. It goes back to my days with AOL. That’s 2004.

I looked up WTS and their reputation doesn’t seem to hot. I still would love to know how they got my banking information. Time will tell. All I have to say if my information was stolen, "good luck getting a loan!"

 

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