Sean Pyles

Yeah, I was lucky to not experience any scams during the holidays.

Although I go through these phases where I'll get like half a dozen scam phone calls a day.

I'm in one of those right now and I don't know what's happening, but I just never answer my phone unless I know the number.

But I did recently have my credit card information stolen, which was a shock to me.

Yeah.

I got an email and a push notification from my credit card company.

This was last week, actually.

I've been saving the story to tell you right here on the podcast.

And it said that there was like a $2,400 purchase of

for tickets on some european slash russian ticket website kind of like ticketmaster but for europe and i went into sort of panic room mode i was like this is the moment i have been training for ever since i started covering this topic at nerd wallet

And I was like, how are they going to exploit me feeling anxious and urgent in this moment?

How are they trying to get me to slip up and give them even more of my information?

So I had the push notification from my credit card company.

And you think that that would be kind of legit, click on that and see.

what is going on in my credit card statement or what's been charged.

But I still didn't trust that.

I also didn't trust the text message they sent me in addition to the email.

So I went straight to the phone number on the back of the card.

That's your best source of information.

Just call that directly because you want to be the one who's initiating contact with them.