It’s a little tough to trust the financial system amid all the news about mass theft of credit card numbers and websites leaking personal information.
Despite bank assurances that things are fine, that their systems have multiple layers of protection, it's prudent to check your accounts every few days to make sure nothing untoward has happened.
To help with that checking, you can sign up for the alert services offered by many financial institutions. Messages will be emailed or texted to you depending on the alert options you've selected. If unauthorized purchases or withdrawals are made, you're apt to know sooner, and be able to cancel a card or shut down an account with less delay.
The types of alerts offered vary, as does the ease of setting them up. Basic alerts are free; more detailed ones may require a subscription fee.
A typical credit card alert can be set off if you are within a certain amount of your credit limit, for example, or if there’s a purchase over a set value. That’s what RBC offers for its credit cards.
Here's one approach to setting a credit limit alert. If you typically charge $1,500 a month to a card and you have a $5,000 credit limit, set an alert to go off when you are within $3,500 of your limit. That way, if your spending pattern is off kilter, you'll receive a notice.
The CIBC website offers to send alerts for a large array of reasons, including:
— when your credit report has changed
— when you exceed budgeted amounts in certain spending categories
— when there’s suspected fraudulent activity
— when a bank machine withdrawal is higher than a set amount
— when there’s an attempt to exceed the bank machine limit
Scotiabank offers to notify you if:
— there’s a purchase without a credit card
— there’s a purchase outside Canada
— there’s a purchase over a certain amount
— what you owe is within a certain amount of the credit limit
BMO has the standard credit limit and purchase limit alerts. It also has alerts for deposits greater than a specified amount and “unusual activity” on your debit card.
On many financial websites, you can set up an alert by looking for a link with the word “alert” in it. You then fill in a form.
I found details for each the big bank’s alert offerings by doing a Google search with the bank name and the word “alert.”
The TD Canada Trust details eluded me. Signing up for alerts at TD Canada Trust is needlessly complicated. Instead of clicking on a link within your account, you have to first “register” your information at a separate TD Canada Trust website. Apart from the inconvenience, that goes against the standard advice about not giving out personal details unnecessarily, especially to an unfamiliar website.
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