Fallout continues to scatter

Yesterday Marian re-checked the online listing of charges against the now-closed card. It included a $79 charge dated 5/11, the day after the card was cancelled!

A hasty call to Citicard security produced the not-very-reassuring explanation that the charge had been "pending" when the account was closed. Great. So cancelling a card doesn't automatically cancel any charges pending against it?

Today she went over it again to finally sort out the real (through 5/8) and the bogus charges, and one on 5/9 stood out: a $36.95 purchase from ticketsnow.com. All the other bogus charges were placed the morning of May 10.

So I called ticketsnow and inquired. Yes, they had processed an order for a single ticket to see Joel Ostine in Minneapolis on 5/29. It was on its way to me now, fed-ex.

Joel Ostine! He's a (gag, ptui!) revival minister!

I'm still baffled as to the purpose of any of this. Some person unknown, the night of 5/9 and the morning of 5/10, placed a bunch (now nearly 20) of small orders for a wide variety of products with a wide range of legitimate online retailers. There was no particular pattern to the purchases, other than not one of them was anything that I would ever, ever consider buying: quack and fringe health or beauty products, get-rich-quick schemes, and (gag, ptui!) Joel Ostine.

They used my credit card, my name, my correct email, my correct address. So there was no attempt to disguise the purchase from me or delay my finding out about it. And the types of stuff bought were not (thank goodness) the kind of thing that could destroy a reputation. Just small quantities of useless junk.

There is no way that anybody could have benefited financially from doing this. The only practical effect was to cause minor irritation and a few hours of wasted time cleaning up.

So why was it done? If it was a prank, it was pretty pointless. If it was an inept fraudster debugging some kind of automated stolen-card testing script, he was a really bad programmer. It's all just strange.