Constant credit card fraud - is this normal?

Question

I have a Chase Sapphire credit card that has only two authorized users: myself and my husband. We are the only ones who have the card. We both use the cards safely following the "rules". I pay using the chip whenever merchants allow it (99% of the time the merchants tell me I need to swipe, but that's another matter).

Despite all that, our card seems to be having fraudulent charges made on it extremely often. In the last few months, I've gotten 6 or 7 replacement cards with new numbers each time. Each time the fraudulent charge is made to a Starbucks Card Reload. I literally have no time to learn my card number when a new one needs to be sent to me.

I have spoken to a manager at the credit card company who assured me I was doing nothing wrong but could unfortunately do nothing about it. I have never heard of anyone having this amount of fraudulent charges, though. Is this a normal but unfortunate tough-luck kind of situation, or is this something that needs to be dealt with another way?

Answer 1

There are two options:

1. You routinely use it with a merchant who has an employee that steals card numbers. If you have regular purchases in a physical store/gas station/restaurant - consider using a different credit card for each store and see where the fraudulent charges appear. That way you'll know who's the guilty party.

2. Similarly it may happen online and a merchant has a leak/breach.

You can also file a police report, although they will probably not do much unless tons of reports start accumulating from a specific area (case #1), then they'll probably investigate.