Buying Online Securely

You've already killed that card, right? If not, kill it now, before you even read the rest of my post. With your purchasing record (I'm inferring), your bank only flagged the transaction for size and not location or the nature of the purchase.

Your number has been hijacked, likely by one of the firms you've dealt with on vcoins. Harlan Berk is hardly a "smaller dealer," and I'm a lot less likely to suspect them, but vcoins is merely an aggregator and not capable of vetting their members as thoroughly as you might think. I don't consider dealing with one of their members until I've found independent verification of the firm, doubly-so if it's located overseas.

Yeah, we as nummismatists need to be a little more vigilant than most about card fraud; many of us buy weird stuff from all over the world and that makes account oversight pretty difficult even for a CC provider who is right on point.

I should qualify my unfavorable words about vcoins to the extent that I'm thinking some of their vendors are at greater risk of having a "bad apple" employee, than I'm believing they deliberately affiliate with unscrupulous vendors. I'm guessing you've already narrowed the possibilities for where it went sideways down to numismatic purchases?

I am happy for you that you caught this fraudulent activity early. The GOV has an agency to report such activity. I cannot recall who they are, but if you google it, you should be able to find them.

Hopefully you notified the card company to get rid of that number. As to HJB, although a large company, they also have a large personal turnover. Someone there that took your order may not be working there today or tomorrow. Same is true of many larger organizations. I used to go to HJB in person a lot and seldom had the same person wait on me. Actually one lady didn't appear to even care of know to much about coins.
The size of a company maeas little as to security. Using a credit card via the internet is really taking a chance. Not sure if you ever knew anyone that had problems with identity theft but I have. AND, although they USED to brag about how easy it is today, Those same people don't do that anymore. I too have had to drop several cards due to sudden odd chasrges. You have to be carefull with using a credit or debit card everywhere.
What happened to you is becoming more and more common. So many constantly say how safe it all is and then eventually they do bite the bullet.