How to prevent credit card number from being stolen?

Question

I have a small business, and my credit card number for the business was recently stolen and used for two purchases: (1) a burger place in my home town of Boston and (2) a Walmart in Arkansas.

I was very surprised because nearly all purchases are online purchases with large companies (Google, Lyft, etc.). I rarely use the card in person with a merchant though I did so in October for business travel in Washington DC (FedEx store, restaurant, CVS). I suspect that the credit card theft doesn't relate to this business travel because I wouldn't expect the thief to wait before using it.

No one else has access to the card.

Any ideas what I can do better to prevent the card number from being stolen? Was this just bad luck?

Answer 1

Without knowing how and where the card details were obtained it is impossible to know if you can actually do anything to prevent a repeat.

If you were the victim of skimming: skimmers are generally designed to steal card data stored on the magnetic stripe when customers swipe their cards.
Maybe you have a really good eye for detail and can spot a tampered payment terminal to prevent getting skimmed. But that is hard and becomes impossible when for instance the skimmer is placed inside the pump at an unattended petrol station.
A better option is to stop swiping completely and start to pay with the chip, use NFC or ApplePay or similar, or go back to cash. That means that you don't swipe the card and nothing can be stolen.

Both small and large, brick and mortar as well as online, retailers have been the victims of data breaches where large amounts of customer credit card details were stolen from their (core/payment) systems, sometimes in (very sophisticated) attacks and at other times due to sloppy security.
As a customer you can't really do anything to prevent your card details from getting stolen from the merchant...

In many businesses not every employee will have their own company card and you may see that a single company card gets used by assistants, secretaries and/or others to make legitimate company purchases, travel arrangements, reservations etc. If "everybody" can use the card nobody will feel personally accountable and you run an increased risk that somebody makes unintentional or fraudulent transactions with the company card as it will be unclear who the culprit is.
Don't hand over your company card to colleagues/employees.

P.S. Some of my personal cards look almost identical to my company cards and I have been known to accidentally use the company card for private expenses

Answer 2

1. Make sure your own computers haven't been breached. Scan them for malware.

2. Every time you pay something in person, generate a unique credit card number unique to that transaction and pay with your smartphone/smartwatch. That's the way Samsung Pay, Google Pay, and Apple Pay all work by default.

3. Even if you can't do that last one 100% of the time, reducing the number of times you give out your real credit card number will still be helpful to you because it can help you narrow down the list of suspects.

4. Consider the possibility that you may have inadvertently given that information yourself to a scammer who was pretending to be from a big player like Amazon, Google, etc.

5. Don't rely on big players to tell you when they're hacked. For instance, when Uber got hacked. They knew they got hacked. They even paid off the hackers. They didn't tell anyone about it for two years.