rSlash - r/Prorevenge Steal My Debit Card? Catch a Felony!

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

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Welcome to our slash pro revenge, where O.P sends a thief to jail. Our next reddit post is from Boo Boo. This happened a few years ago right after I graduated college. I would make an eight hour drive home a few times a year to see family, usually over the holidays. During these trips, there was only wilderness, fields, mountains, and tiny towns along the way. During one of these trips, I stopped at a gas station to get some food, and apparently I lost my debit card. It was a card that I never used, and it looked identical to my main one, so I didn't notice it missing until later when I got a call from my bank, and I saw

that my account was over drafted. Being fresh out of college making $12 bucks an hour, the $400 that was stolen was a huge deal. I worked at a credit card processor at the time, so I had a very unusual familiarity with how credit card transactions worked. Technically this was a debit card, but it ran as credit. I could have done a chargeback, of course, but I knew that merchants were fine $15 for each chargeback on top of the return, and they got a ding on their record. If they had too many chargebacks, they would have their processing revoked and incur heavy fines. Merchants are usually mom and pop shops, and are usually innocent in this matter, so I decided to

give them a call. Also, the charges all came from the same gas station that I lost it at, so I suspected that it was an employee who either found or stole my card and was stupid enough to use it at work. I wanted to let the manager slash owner know about it so they could keep an eye out for unscrupulous employees. I thought that I would just give them a call and ask for a refund, easy. I call in a woman answers. I asked to speak with a manager and she says that she's the manager.

I explained that I'd lost my card at that location and someone had later used my card there. I said that I didn't want to accuse anyone, but I think that one of her employees had the card and she might want to investigate. I also said that I'd like a return for all the purchases to save them the hassle of a chargeback. Usually when I work with managers in the situation, they're very willing to help and take employee theft very seriously. But this time, instead, I met with hostility and insults. She told me that I probably deserved it for losing my card in the first place and not noticing, and that I deserved this lesson.

She interrupted me and told me basically to go f myself and that none of her employees would steal. Getting a bad feeling, I asked for the number of the owner. She said there is no owner. What? By now, I'm shaking an anger, so I tell her that I'm calling the cops and I hang up. She tries to call back, but I don't answer. By now, I'm angry crying.

I have a pretty good feeling that I know who did it, but now I need to prove it. I had no intention of calling the cops because what cops care about some petty credit card theft. It's incredibly hard to prove, and most cops have murder and other stuff to worry about. Lucky for me, this is in the middle of nowhere in a town with a population of like 100 people. First, I call my bank and ask if they have the record of the exact times the card was used. They give me the times down to the minutes. I then call the cops and get a very

friendly woman. It seems that she's not busy and actually listens to my story, including the hostile manager. I ask if she's able to go look at the surveillance tapes or something. She says the store is five minutes away and she would stop by. I guess she felt sorry for me or was bored, but hey, I'll take it. She says that she'll give me a call if she finds anything. I eagerly await her call, but I wasn't expecting much. A couple of days go by, and I get a call from the nice officer lady. She said that she went to the store and reviewed the footage.

At the exact times that I told her, the cameras caught the hostile manager making purchases and signing receipts for the exact same amount with a car that looked exactly like mine. Even better, they were going to charge her with felony identity theft, since making purchases on someone's card without permission is identity theft on top of monetary theft. They asked me if I wanted any restitution, but my bank had refunded me the stolen money, so I declined. I was absolutely not expecting a cop to go out of their way to help me,

and I was definitely not expecting it to result in an arrest. I felt a sense of pride for actually sticking up for myself, and not just taking the money from the bank and letting the thief go. I'm a pretty small and non-confrontational person, but that day I felt like a badass. If she had been nice and worked with me or even just apologized and done the returns, I wouldn't have called the cops.

But since she was so rude and unhelpful, she got a felony instead. Down in the comments, Hazely I'd Wolf says exactly what I was thinking. I'm betting the cop knew who the jerk at their local convenience store was, and also who the real owner-slash manager was. The cop probably reached out to the real manager who took it seriously, as any manager would, and then complied with the investigation. I'm betting the manager wasn't sad to see this person leave, either. Our next credit post is from the bald nerd. Some background.

I'm an avid transformers fan and I still collect figures to this day. A few years ago, I was looking for a botcon exclusive shattered glass rautomus. Prices on eBay were too high, so I turned to an alternative website. I've bought and sold items there several times and I've gotten great deals. I put out a post of what I was looking to buy and waited. The next day, I get a message from a user that I'll call douchebag. Douchebag said that he had a shattered glass rotumus and he would sell it for 200 bucks. That was like half of what they went for on eBay at the time, so I accepted and sent the money by a PayPal as a gift. Some of

the balance was paid via my PayPal balance and the majority off my credit card. So 50 bucks from PayPal and 150 off my credit card. This detail is important later. In short, douchebag lied. He never had the figure that I wanted in the first place and he scam me out of 200 bucks. I went to the website's forums calling this guy out and I asked for help from the mods over there. After doing so, I called PayPal. Sadly, since the payment was sent as a gift, there was nothing they could do to refund me. However, the rep told me that since 150 was paid for my credit card, I could file a claim with them. They told me what department to call, who to talk to, and what sort of claim to file. Awesome!

He also put a note in douchebag's account to be investigated. After calling the credit card company, someone on the forums emailed me saying they knew this seller in real life and they gave me his contact details. Normally, I don't support doxing someone, but this guy is a thief, so screw him. I called douchebag and left a voicemail in text. He later called me and tried to play dumb. Then he said that both his website account and his PayPal were hacked. Really? What a coincidence! I told him he should refund my money or I would call the cops and have them sort this out. He caved after that and gave me a sob story about how he needed the money to buy his daughter a Christmas gift. I didn't buy a story and I threatened legal action.

He had to have his girlfriend send me money back through her PayPal account since his ended up getting locked due to all this nonsense. So I got my 200 bucks back. Here's the kicker. I never told him that I filed a claim against him with my credit card company. Keep in mind that he only sent me back 50 bucks for PayPal. My credit card company refunded me 150 bucks, so 200 total. This meant they had this guy's info too, so they would come after him to recoup their costs. A week later, my bank called me and told

me the seller was claiming that I breached PayPal's terms of service and blah, blah, blah. I called the guy again and told him that if he lied, I would call the cops. An hour later, my bank said everything was resolved and to have a nice day. Our next reddit post is from a stickler. So this all happened about 15 years ago, give or take when I was still a kid living at home. We had a house with a huge backyard in the suburbs, and the neighboring property next to our driveway was a set of three attached rental flats, each with their front door facing our house. We were usually good friends with most of our neighbors. The flats next door included. After the family in the middle flat

left, an older single woman moved in. She was home more often than not, so I doubt that she had a job, and she wasn't particularly friendly. She kept to herself, which is fine, and never really acknowledged any of her neighbors. Whatever, that's cool. So, one Saturday around midday, I was out back with the lawnmower earning myself some pocket money. It's a big yard, so about 20 minutes in I was halfway done, and suddenly a noise control officer knocks on the door. They tell us to hurry it up, that they'd received received a complaint and though they thought it was ridiculous they had to say something. It was a bit stupid, but whatever. Now we are not allowed family at all. No parties, screaming, or anything like that. Over

the next month, we kept getting visits from noise control, always during the day mind you. We would get visits for mowing the lawn and even had a couple of complaints about my younger sister and I playing and hanging out in the backyard on weekends or in the afternoon after school. Again, we weren't all that loud. At the time, I would have been about 13, so more often than not, the boy next door and I would just be chilling on the swings outside talking. Not loud, just being outside.

Now, we've never had an issue with noise before. None of our other neighbors ever had a problem. We had never had noise control called before now. So, we asked around, and it was fairly obvious at this point that the snobby cow that had moved into the flat next door was doing all the complaining. My father would always stock up on firewood in the summer to prepare for winter and would have to chop it up himself. It's the first weekend of chopping for the year and it's about 2pm on a Saturday. He pulls out his old chainsaw and it's on for like 90 seconds before he realized the chain needs to be replaced. He turns it off, grabs the axe, and proceeds to chop with the slow way. Next thing we know, noise control shows up.

At this point, the officers are sick of having to visit us and are pretty friendly with my dad by now. It turns out that, yes, it was the new neighbor next door. It also turned out that she had been an issue for them for a while and that noise control was well aware of her stupid complaints from all of her previous addresses. Unfortunately, they were legally obligated to follow through with them. Next weekend, surprise, surprise, we get

a visit after dad's been chopping more wood with the axe. At this point, he decides, screw it. Why not give her something to actually complain about? A family friend of ours happened to be a truck driver. He drove a big rig that was almost at the Optimus Prime level up and down the country. He also happened to be back in town that weekend. We gave him a call and he was keen to help us out. Our next step was to warn all the other neighbors who were all fully on board because as it turns out, we weren't the only ones that she was complaining about. So fast forward next weekend at about 9 a.m.

We spend about half an hour getting this great big truck down our driveway. It was a pretty wide driveway, but it was also a really wide truck too, so it was a really tight squeeze. Now having been good friends with the previous neighbors, we were familiar with the internal layouts of these flats. The bedrooms were directly next to their front doors facing our driveway. We managed to get the cab of this massive truck far enough into the driveway to get it directly next to this woman's bedroom. There's about a meter and a half separating the truck from her wall.

Perfect. And then on goes the horn. It is loud as hell and it terrifies our cats. Our friend hits the horn again and again and then the kids get a turn. You could hear that thing a block away. We did it for about 10 minutes, went inside for some coffee and then came back out and hit the horn one more time for good measure before our friend took off. This time there were no noise control officers, no complaints, nothing. She moved out the next week, her next reddit posted from deleted. For context, I'm a lawyer, but I haven't always been a lawyer, once upon a time I was a law student. And law students have all

the arrogance of a lawyer, 1% of the knowledge, but 10 times the reckless abandon. Here's how all that came together. I moved to Washington, D.C. to do the last semester of my law schooling at Georgetown. I jumped into an apartment with two other people, but I never met the landlord. My roommates liked me and said that I can move in, but they said the landlord had a review process that could take a few weeks because he's lazy and or slow.

They also mentioned that he was a huge jerk. Never fixed anything, hadn't so much as mode the grass in years, and he hadn't paid the light bill in the lobby for months, so we didn't have any porch lights. Whatever, I still needed a place to live. I asked them if they cared that I moved in that day though, and they said they were fine with it.

I knew enough landlord, tenant law, and DC to know that the tenant basically always wins as long as they're paying and not destroying the property. We used to call this the pissing on the walls rule. So I moved in and just skipped the interview. I sent my first check to the landlord right away, a deposit, followed immediately by a month's rent. He deposited them as soon as he got them. A week later or so, he raises hell about me moving in without an interview and threatens to kick me out. I kindly pointed out that he had accepted my deposit and rent payment, and therefore I

was officially a tenant. If he wanted to kick me out, he would have to start the process in court, which is expensive and takes forever. He huffed and left me alone. I quietly paid my rent for months and months, but alas, all good things come to an end, and I had to move out eventually. I emailed the landlord two months and then one month in advance of leaving. I let him know that he should come inspect their property to make sure that I hadn't

caused any damage that would require my deposit, and that if not, I would like it back. I never heard from him. The time eventually came that I was done living there and I moved out. I had everything packed and was ready to leave. Then I notified the landlord that I would like my deposit back. He said that if I wanted the deposit back, I could start the process in courts. I smiled. I already knew that was coming. Turns out, Mr. Landlord, those emails I sent you happened to correspond with the exact days and timing that I'm required to give you in order to get my security deposit

back. Oh, by the way, that request to come inspect the premises that you never replied to was also part of the process. And by not coming, you've officially waved your inspection as of today, 45 days later or something. Also, I just so happen to have already filled out the small claim for return of a security deposit. Here's your copy. I'm electronically filing this with the court today. Good luck!

About 10 days later, I got a check in the mail. That was our slash pro revenge, and if you liked this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day. If you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.