Since we’ve had no income, as part of our controlling discretionary spending, all of our annual renewals for various charitable/political/whatever organizations had been stacking up on my desk. Now that mrs. dwex has a job (well, will in 2 weeks), I went through the stack to send in my annual donations. After doing five of them, on the sixth one, my credit card was declined. After verifying that I’d entered my credit card info correctly, I guessed that all of these identically-priced transactions in very rapid sequence had set off an alarm at the credit card company. So I called them up and went through their voice prompt system (credit card number, social security number, password, etc). They immediately launched into an inquiry requiring me to indicate whether I recognized a handful of transactions. I indicated that I did, they removed the hold, and then back to submitting contributions.

All without having to interact with a human being for any of it.

God, I love technology smile

BTW - most credit card companies allow you to choose a password to use in place of “mother’s maiden name”. If you haven’t done so, I suggest that you do it. I did this five years ago or so after someone social-engineered the credit card company into changing the billing and email address associated with my account (which I found after having my credit card declined for some purchase or another and called them to complain).