Fraud alert

Thanks, Citi, for calling about the several suspicious dot com charges to my account! I don't know how they do it - they didn't contact me when I was putting all kinds of crazy super-high charges for the wedding on it left and right, but they saw 3 or 4 small charges to some online websites and they flagged the account.

I'm sure there are certain merchants that are on their list to flag, but I'm impressed that they were so quick about it, as they were so recent that only one of them showed up in my recent account activity. That charge was only for $1, so easy to miss if you're not checking carefully, and I'm sure they were testing that the account worked first, so I'm surprised the other charges were for only around $30 instead of immediately trying to make a huge charge. I check the online activity every few days or so, but I should make it a daily activity just in case.

I have several accounts with Citi (banking and credit) and have always been pretty pleased. The account in question is their CashRewards card. At the time I got it, they were offering 5% back for 3 months, which was awesome because we charged pretty much all of the wedding expenses on it. (When my 3 months ran out, I had DH open one in his name to put the remaining expenses leading up to the wedding. I decided any hit to our credit scores was worth it since we had just secured a loan for our house and they were in different names.) We got soooo much cash back. Obviously, charging a wedding or another huge expense isn't a good idea if you don't have the ability to pay it off each month, but it worked for us.

In my opinion, cash back cards do a lot more for you than airlines miles or points to redeem for gift cards. (And the cash is believed to be tax-free.) Now that the cash back on the card is back to 1%, which is standard, but I could probably do better, so I might do some shopping around soon. I have another 1% card that I just realized gives 2% on utilities, groceries, etc., so I'm going to start using it for those categories.