Compromised
We use our (Navy Federal Credit Union) credit card for almost everything here. We aren’t charged any foreign transaction fees and we pay it off in full every month. With every other card we have (except Discover which is accepted almost nowhere in Panama), we incur foreign transaction fees.
And if we pay cash, we get charged $6.80 for every withdrawal (Panama law). This will change once all of our immigration stuff is settled because the service provided by our attorney is a package deal that includes opening a bank account — but we’re not quite there yet. Anyway…
Credit Card fraud hits us especially hard since A) the card has to be canceled (and now I have no credit card to pay for stuff without getting hit with foreign transaction fees), and B) a new card has to be sent out to me.
Back in the States, not a huge deal. The card shows up in the mail in a week or so; inconvenient but liveable. In Panama, though, “shows up in the mail” is a whole different ballgame. All the more so because the “home address” that the bank has on file for us is our mail forwarding address. Not the package forwarding address, but the mail forwarding address — where things get scanned and sent to us digitally but not physically.
So now, Anytime Mailbox is going to receive my new credit card, scan it, and send me a picture of it. And I’m going to have to get them to send it to someone else so they can send it to our package forwarding address so that it will ultimately get to me in Coronado. (But will it get there before we’ve moved on to our next place on April 5…?)
There’s even a problem with that, though… The people at Anytime Mailbox won’t physically forward mail until I jump through some hoops in which a test piece of physical mail is sent and received/verified. It might be faster to just have them shred the damn thing and ask the credit union to resend the card to the other (package forwarding) location.
What a headache. 🤕