Quicken, WTF?

The other day I was doing some household bills in Quicken, and I ran the update step to download data from all my financial institutions. Reviewing the charges on my main credit card, I spotted one that really stuck out from the rest: A $250 charge to match.com.

Uh, oh.

I’m a married man, and although I’ve never actually asked my wife her opinion, I’m pretty sure she’d frown on my dating other women. And I’m pretty sure match.com wouldn’t let a married guy like me join. (That’s what Ashley Madison is for.)

In any case, I know I never setup a match.com account. Apparently, someone had gotten ahold of my credit card number and was charging stuff to it. Oh man, this was going to be a mess. I’d have to cancel that card, and I’d been using it for everything (reward points, don’t you know). I’d have to change it on a couple of dozen web sites at least, and hope I didn’t miss something important, like my phone or internet bill.

As I was logging into the credit card website to get contact numbers and take a look at the account, I started to wonder why they had charged match.com. I’m pretty sure professional credit card thieves will buy stuff that’s easy to fence, like consumer electronics, jewelry, or car parts. Amateurs might buy something just to have it, but what could they do with a match.com account? If they actually tried to use it, it would be easy for authorities to catch them — just make a date. It didn’t make sense.

I wanted to have a list of fraudulent transactions before calling, so I pulled up the list of pending transactions on the website to see if there was anything else suspicious. There wasn’t. And as it turns out, there was no charge from match.com either.

Quicken has this feature for importing data from financial institutions where it renames the often somewhat confusing merchant identification to something more user-friendly. So, for example, it will rename “Shell Gas #3486” to just “Shell Gas.” That’s easier to read, and if I happen to stop at five different Shell gas stations, it conveniently groups them under a single payee. Generally, it’s helpful.

In this case, however, I had recently donated money through my employer’s corporate matching program, and they outsource the administration to a company that runs a website called easymatch.com. For some reason, Quicken thought that “EASYMATCH.COM DONATION” should be changed to match.com. (Their online service, mint.com, does the same thing.)

So, false alarm. Whew. But dammit, Quicken, that wasn’t smart at all.