Bank Local

When I moved to my current Portland neighborhood back in late 2018, I opted to switch my banking to a credit union half a block from my front door. This decision today made what otherwise would have been an exhausting problem into a minor headache.

Early this morning, I received two texts and a voicemail purporting to be a declined transaction notification from their fraud department, but the telephone number came up in a search for scam alerts. I tried calling the credit union at their regular number but since call volume was high and the telephone is not my favorite thing for stress, I opted instead to send a message via their app, with screenshots of the texts and voicemail message.

Then after breakfast I walked to one of my regular coffeeshops, ordered my latte, and had tap after tap after tap of my Apple Pay declined.

I told the barista he might want to pull my order out of the queue because my card had been declined and I was heading up the street to the credit union to see what was what, and I’d just leave my travel mug there in the meantime.

Short version from the credit union: the texts and call were real, and someone really did attempt to use my debit card at something called Peruvian Connection. Since I hadn’t responded to the texts or voicemail in a timely manner, my card had been turned off as a precaution. We disabled it entirely and they printed me a new card on the spot.

(Bonus shoutout here to the teller dealing with this for coming over to make sure it then got added to Apple Wallet, because he’d seen some problems with it and he just wanted to make sure I didn’t walk out and then have an issue. While their new “hole your phone near the chip on your card” process did not work, manual entry worked fine. So, I didn’t need any additional assistance, but I thanked him for thinking of it.)

Back, then, to the coffeeshop, where when I walked up the barista pointed down the counter to my travel mug, said I was all good and that my card was declined—as if I had not told him that to begin with before I left, explaining why I was leaving in the middle of an order.

(This is the same new-ish barista there who at least twice has almost made me a regular instead of a decaf, at least one of those times because he was too distracted chatting with another custom who was hanging out at the counter while my drink was being made. He’s not my favorite.)

It’s unclear to me how they got my card number. My physical debit card stays at home, because I use Apple Pay everywhere I go. I can’t even remember the last time I had to bring my card with me in case I needed it. Presumably this was part of some data breach or another. After lunch, I sat down with my accounting app to make sure I found all the places where I needed to update autopayment information, with three days to spare until the next schedule transaction.

At any rate, while I hate the entire process of having to remove my mirrorshades on the rare occasion when I have to visit my credit union branch (it’s way too bright in there for my autistic sensory processing disorder), this is not the first time what could have been an all-day affair that would try and test my chronic fatigue instead was just an annoyance, because I was smart and decided to bank local—very, very local—when I moved here.