He was the CTO of a reasonably large hedge fund at the time, so it's reasonable to think he was the target of a spear fishing attack. If you don't need the magnetic strip to actually be magnetic, I don't think making a fake credit card is much different from making a fake ID.
Though, I suppose it's possible he was telling me a tall tale, he's generally trustworthy.
The two additional explanations would be that he was confused about what was going on, or that there was genuinely a mixup at his bank. If he was confused about what was going on, it would seem that he would have needed to have gotten a card that he didn't remember applying for, and being confused about which bank issued it. The spear fishing and mixup at his bank both sound like million-to-one odds to me.
So now, re-evaluating things based on what I've learned about banks in the past 15 years, maybe his bank grew organically by acquiring several other banks, and has incomplete consolidation internally. Maybe he requested a card from one subsidiary of the bank, forgot about it, and called another subsidiary of the bank (the one that gave him his first card), which had no idea what was going on. The internal structures of large banks are much more disjoint than I realized 15 years ago.
Though, I suppose it's possible he was telling me a tall tale, he's generally trustworthy.
The two additional explanations would be that he was confused about what was going on, or that there was genuinely a mixup at his bank. If he was confused about what was going on, it would seem that he would have needed to have gotten a card that he didn't remember applying for, and being confused about which bank issued it. The spear fishing and mixup at his bank both sound like million-to-one odds to me.
So now, re-evaluating things based on what I've learned about banks in the past 15 years, maybe his bank grew organically by acquiring several other banks, and has incomplete consolidation internally. Maybe he requested a card from one subsidiary of the bank, forgot about it, and called another subsidiary of the bank (the one that gave him his first card), which had no idea what was going on. The internal structures of large banks are much more disjoint than I realized 15 years ago.