My first denunciation

I went to the Mossos in Sant Cugat today to denounce whoever has been using my inactivated credit card.

The place was pretty quite. The guy in front of me was asking if he was wanted for anything. They looked in all their databases and came to the conclusion that it didn’t look like he had any arrest warrants pending. He didn’t seem to be very happy about this and left with a scowl on his face.

Once past the receptionist, I sat down in the office of one of the Mossos, who looked at my file, then went to Google on his computer to see what the credit card charges were for. Eventually we agreed that it was definitely for the tunnels. Not sure why it was relevant, but perhaps he was just bored.

After that, he filled in a rather extensive form letter saying that the card was stolen, etc. I signed the denunciation and another form informing me that I had a right to lawyer etc, and that was that.

I asked him if they ever bothered to track down the people that use stolen credit cards in the tunnels. After all, they do have cameras taking pictures of every car that passes. If they can justify sending a photo-radar fine based on the picture of the car, you’d think they could send out a fine for using a stolen credit card. But no, he mentioned that the company that runs the tunnels uses an ancient IT system that would be too expensive to upgrade for doing something like that.

I think the other factor is that unless you steal more that 400 euros, there’s zero consequences if you are caught, so the police doesn’t really waste any effort on it.