I'm in the middle of this right now. I don't know who exactly did it yet, but I suspect a local Mexican restaurant skimmed my data from my debit card. They bought $300 in wireless phone cards, two bus tickets from Texas, and attempted to make a $1400 purchase from Lowe's.
The reason I use debit cards is simple - I'm not disciplined enough to stay out of credit card debt. My bank (USAA) is ridiculously easy to work with when it comes to fraud issues. They cancelled my card and issued me a new one within 24 hours of my identifying the fraud. They'll also reverse any charges I disupte and refund any NSF fees that may pop up. At most, I'll have an inconvenience that could last as long as 3 days.
I check my bank account, online, everyday...debit misuses will show up overnight. Credit card misuses only show up when you get your bill once a moth, unless you check your credit card online (which I do about once a week.)
We have a local Mexican restaurant that was doing the same thing. People that had used either debit or credit cards at the restaurant found that their accounts had hundreds of dollars in charges. The charges were traced to Mexico a day after they had eaten at the restaurant in Indiana. I believe the restaurant is about to go under from the bad publicity.
Well.... there's this thing called cash. And another thing called checks. They're kind of old fashioned, but they work.
Use the envelope system and a budget. It worked for Dave Ramsey.
My debit card turned up missing with a $350 hit at a local walmart.......I had the money back in my account within days. Could have messed up a mortgage payment or something, but it didn’t. We were lucky.
The only time we ever had our credit card info stolen though was when we moved up here from GA. We used the Discover exclusively for the trip. Discover refunded 100% of the bad charges, no questions asked. The biggest frustration was getting a new card...