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Last week, I was at work for 14 hours Wednesday night/Thursday morning and getting ready to start my weekend. I was dead tired, and didn't feel like taking public transportation home, so I called a cab. The first thing I always do before I call a cab, go out to a restaurant/bar etc. is to double check my bank account to make sure that I have plenty of funding. I confirmed that everything was in good shape with online banking, and called the cab company.
When we arrived at my house, I handed the driver my debit card. It was declined. Since it was early in the morning, I thought there was a possibility that the banks had just opened their business day and some transactions that I had missed had went through. So I went in the house and transferred some funds to my checking account to ensure that everything would be covered (at this point, my online account still said I had plenty enough money to cover the fare) I went back to the cab and asked him to run my card again. He refused, saying he would not run the same card twice.
At this point I'm getting annoyed and paranoid. No worries, though, there's a corner market right across the street with an ATM machine. I hopped over and tried to make a withdrawal. No luck. At this point, I start to panic, and the cab driver starts swearing at me because he thinks I'm a deadbeat. He agrees to take me to my nearest bank branch (about a mile away) which has just opened for business. I go inside, and the cab driver follows me in, angrily pacing up and down the lobby. Luckily, the bank wasn't very busy, so I was able to talk to the manager right away. She ran my account number and told me my debit card had been suspended due to fraud investigation, and that I needed to call my home branch to find out what was going on.
At this point, the cab driver is still angrily pacing up and down the lobby of the bank as I'm using the bank phone to call my home branch. I'm in full panic mode, and the managers are starting to get annoyed by the cab driver. I finally get to talk to my home bank manager. Apparently, my debit card got suspended because two weeks prior I had used an ATM that someone had installed a fucking skimming device on. While I'm working things out over the phone, the bank manager mercifully let me take a withdrawal so I could pay the cab driver (who kept his meter running the entire time and ended up costing me a fortune) and get him out of the facility. Turns out there were a lot of customers who suffered the same fate as I had. The real kicker is that my card was still functional 15 hours before when I used it to buy cigarettes and some iced tea on my way to work.
I ended up walking the mile back home, completely exhausted but relieved that I still had all of my money in my account. That was kind of an awkward situation.
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