Carrier Pigeon

When I came home last night, I found a letter from my credit card company in the post box. They informed me that "for security reasons" my account had been deactivated and asked me to call them during their office hours. Which I did this morning. Apparently, they had received a long list of card numbers with which dodgy business could potentially be made and therefore decided to deactivate them all. Now I am thankful for their pre-emptive measures, but I am mildly surprised at their anachronistic form of communication. It's not that they don't have my phone number or e-mail address to which they send my monthly account statement, by the way. The lady on the phone informed me that a new card will be sent to me on Monday. I told her that I found their mode of communication somewhat unusual and would not have been pleased had I been on holiday and found out at the frontdesk of a hotel that my credit card didn't work. "I know, we should have called you," she said, "but so many people were affected we decided to send out letters." Right. She couldn't tell me where the potential abuse originated (such as online shops I could shun in the future) and just said they didn't know and it could be "from the internet or just from a salesperson who wrote down the number".