We had been lucky for 13 years as we never had to report a stolen or lost EC card. But last Saturday, in the midst of a local fest here in Oberursel, my husband’s card went missing.

After turning pockets, bags, and many other crevices inside out, we realized we had to call to report the loss and cancel the card.

Reporting our missing card was a totally new experience for me – especially talking to an automaton, who will detect accents and tell you he won’t understand you (it had happened to one of my students…)

You need to call: 069 – 74 09 87 (drop a zero when calling outside Germany)

The automaton will ask you several yes and no questions and your Bankleitzahl (bank code number), which he will repeat once more. One confusing statement it made was by continuing I would ask for cancellation of all cards for this bank account. I did not want this as we only wanted to cancel the lost card. Risky as it was, I answered with yes. In the end you get a real person and she helped me get things straight.

Whether traveling out of country or just going to work, you need to know your bank account number and bank code at the time of calling. If you do not have this information on hand, they are not able to help you. If this happened on the weekend – like it did in our case -then you would have to wait until Monday to report the loss. Luckily, we were able to call from home within an hour.

Anyway, in the case of not knowing your data, you could be held responsible for theft withdrawals from the time of theft until you retrieve and report your bank code and account number. Your reporting will be recorded on tape (the date and time of the reporting) and only as of then you are insured.

Some banks may advise you to record the loss/theft to the police. You can file a report, just in case.

Important: If you do not have your secret PIN number stolen with the card, the bank insurance will cover all loss from your account.

Tags: EC card cancellation, phone number, reporting EC card theft, reporting lost EC cards

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 10:03 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.