Until yesterday afternoon, I thought things like EC card fraud can't happen to you if you're always careful with using your card - well, I was very wrong about that, it can happen to anyone :-(
Yesterday, after lunch I routinely checked the balance of my bank account using phone banking and was really shocked to hear that it was -4785 EUR - at the beginning of a month, something must be wrong. I immediately asked for customer support to check what was going on. First thing the customer service agent said to me was something like "Oh shit, f... we have a problem :-(" - someone was using my card to withdraw money from ATM machines in Bankog - there were a bunch of such withdrawals of 10.000 whatever-their-currency-is (which converts to about 220 EUR).
So today, I basically spent the whole day doing paperwork. First I had to go to my bank's local branch to get a detailed statement of all these withdrawals - then go to the police to file a report and then fax a copy of it to the bank.
The good news is, the bank already told me that I'll get my money back - since I still have the card, someone must have copied it when I was using an ATM or paying with it at one of these pay-at-pump gas stations.
It was just very frustrating to do all the paperwork and spend hours of waiting. The local police was extremely busy today and the officer I was supposed to talk to was called to several different operations while I was there, so I had to wait a lot.
Sometimes it's a little bit scary to wait that long at a police stations. They send you into a small room to wait till an officer has time for you and if you wait there for some time, a lot of other people come and go - most of them have problems like "Oh, I got my apartment searched yesterday, and you seized XYZ, where can I get it back?" or "Oh, I'm here to surrender my driver's license" or "Oh, I damaged XYZ while I was drunk and was asked to report here".