My wife and I each have an everyday rewards account. We use them interchangeably depending on who has better points deals.
We tend to save our points for christmas (and on my account we have them banked for christmas), but for months our points balance on my wife's account has been at 0. I thought it was weird, but assumed my wife had been using the points when shopping (and she assumed I had been using them).
With the return of the everyday extra 10% off to online use, we put together an online grocery shop today and tried to apply the 10% off code at checkout, only to be given an error message. When we checked our receipt history, we were gutted to realise that someone had used our 10% off code already this month, and that same person has been using our points every time we have accumulated them since January this year. We never noticed because the points were always removed from our account before we even realised they were there, and we hadn't had the need to go through our receipts for any reason.
This person has taken over $200 in points, and two everyday extra 10% offs which would have saved us about another $70.
The worst part is that they shop at our local Woolworths. Regularly. They pay with their card too, so they would surely be identifiable?
I assume everyday rewards can issue is a new card number, but I just don't really know if there's anything I can do to recover the lost money. I will contact Woolworths tomorrow but I'm not optimistic they'll give us anything back. I also turned push notifications on for receipts so I know if they use the card again, in the unlikely event I'm at Woolies and I get a notification I can bolt to the checkout and find out who this SOB is. Is there anything else I should do? If there's nothing I can do then I'll take it as an annoying $270 lesson and let it be.
Also, is it possible that someone is making a genuine mistake? I don't know how they could have possibly gotten my rewards barcode, but I know others have had similar experiences (e.g. here).
Thanks.
Update:
Thanks everyone for your help. I got on the phone with a Woolworths customer service rep and they credited us with all of the stolen points and back-issued us 10% off our largest two shops (paid in points) to replace the codes this person used. They also cancelled/reissued the card and we changed the account password. I'm relieved, but the mystery of who this person is (and whether they are connected to us in some way) remains unsolved, I guess it will be forever unsolved. Short of waiting outside of woolies every day and waiting to get a notification that they've used the card, I'm not sure there was any way to get to the bottom of that. But if per-chance the mystery is every solved, I'll make sure to update the post again.
inb4 staff using customer point conspiracy I have heard.