Some additional tips:
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Don’t use your debit card for any online purchases (and if you’re going to be even more paranoid don’t use it at gas stations, sketchy businesses, and such – use a real credit card if you can).
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Set up another bank account just for linking to online wallets (like PayPal). Your bank should be able to do this as an add-on to your existing account. What I do is I keep a small amount of money in this account at all times (like $50) to keep it active. If I need to make a larger online purchase I will transfer money from my main account to this alternate account. If my online wallet account got breached, the hacker would only get away with a small amount of money.
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If you have a credit card, see if your issuer will give you an alternate card and use this only for online purchases. (Or if you’re able get another credit card from a different company and only use it for online purchases.)
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Crank up the fraud protections on your account(s) as high as possible. This may cause some annoyances when making big purchases or traveling and having to call the card issuer, but this also will put a stop to many kinds of fraud much more quickly. (Make sure you put a travel notice on your card before traveling to avoid additional frustration.)
I’ve been a victim of credit card fraud more times than I can count and the key is to limit the blast radius of this happening as much as possible. I’d much rather deal with the annoyance of spending an afternoon on the phone with the CC company’s fraud department rather than the horror of my bank account being drained and having to figure out how in the hell I’m going to pay the month’s bills.
Oh and FTR, this sentence had me seething:
When I called them for an update and to demand justice, they told me they couldn’t tell me any details about the case because I was not the victim, the bank was. Obviously, things could have been a lot worse: I did get the money back.
Fuck that shit.
