I've posted before about how my car was broken into at our daycare. This is on the rise again in my area so I'm putting it out there as a PSA. Please do not leave your purse or any valuables in your car during daycare pickup/dropoff! Just last evening, while in our daycare two cars were broken into. They were both directly in front of the building within 30 feet of the entrance to the building. One car was running with the keyless remote of the car in the stolen handbag.

How it works: The criminals know that this is a chaotic and busy time at daycares and with us frazzled parents trying to be in a hurry to go about our next task. They watch for a mom to walk into the daycare without a bag. When she's inside, they smash the car window, grab the purse and are gone within about 15 seconds. These are smart criminals that prey on trusting parents. They are looking for cash, checkbooks and identification. They aren't likely to use the credit cards.

In my case they got my purse which contained my drivers license, ss card, credit and debit cards. I fortunately had my phone in my pocket that day. It cost me about $500 to replace my car window and a lot of time cancelling my financial life and getting it re-set. In the immediate this was the only damage.

About 10 months later the criminals used my ID and debit card (which was turned off). They had someone else's checkbook (we'll call her Jane Doe). They wrote checks payable to me from Jane Doe's checkbook. They took the checks (9 of them, each for just under $2,000) to 6 different branches of my bank (Bank of America). They went through the drive thru, presented my drivers license and debit card as ID to get the checks cashed. Of course Jane Doe's checks were stolen so they bounced. So about $18,000 was taken from my bank account because the bank presumed that I had all of the cash from the checks that were cashed in the drive thru's.

Banks don't verify checks under $2,000. Going through the drive thru gave the criminal the advantage in that the teller couldn't really see that my ID wasn't matching the image of the person in the car. The big banks (particularly BOA) are poor at handling this sort of thing. They don't put the most stringent fraud controls on your account until the fraud actually occurs. Meaning, they didn't really do anything to protect my account when I originally told them of the theft. They closed my old accounts and opened new ones, but behind the scenes they were connected. The only way to finally escape this for me was to completely change banks.

So please take my plea. Lock your car, protect your valuables when you are at daycare dropoff/pickup, at the park playing, at the gym working out. Anywhere that it feels inconvenient to hustle your purse around, TAKE IT!

Please don't be the victim of the next smash and grab. Share this with every woman you know. Not just moms, every woman. It also happened to a co-worker who was biking trails at a local park. She drove to the park in her car, unloaded her bike and left her purse behind, visible. She came back to a broken car window and no purse.