A weekend away with my G-F.. to mark 7 years since our first date has nearly ended in financial embarrassment. 

We stayed at a lovely beach-side resort in northern New South Wales.. but when we went to check out, my credit card was declined.

Initially I thought it was just a magnetic strip that had seen better days.  Then I went to a supermarket.  Again declined.

So I call the bank.. and apparently there were some transactions being made in Europe.. around the same time I was making transactions in Australia.  So they'd put a freeze on the card.

I have a credit card with a photo on it.. to try to decrease the risk of fraud.  But somehow, it appears crooks have 'skimmed' the data on the magnetic strip and copied it.

How or when this happened is unclear.  A check of my transactions indicates I haven't used the card anywhere unusual lately.  Just supermarket chains, pharmacies and the like.  Oh, and 1 on line accommodation booking company (for the weekend away).  But they have a secure site and I've used them before.  So how they got the information remains a mystery.

The other mystery is why the bank hadn't contacted me.  According to their security department, someone had tried to phone both my home and work numbers.. but they were supposedly disconnected.

That's not the case.. which makes you wonder about banks with call centres in India.  Do they really know what they're doing??