We have had more than one company card at my work have fraud charges within 30 minutes of activating a new card. The fraud department at the bank said there are some out there than have computers run numbers and make small charges like a few pennies to see if they are good numbers. Once they have some, they runt he card until it shuts off for fraud. This is dated info we were told maybe 10 years ago.
There are card readers out there on gas pumps, servers at restaurants scan cards (we had that happen on a new card first used at one restaurant in downtown Houston), card readers at stores, etc. I have seen plenty of body cam videos of these scammers getting busted with card readers made to go over the scanners at grocery stores and other places. It seems more prevalent in some states. A majority of the people I have seen busted were Romanian.
I also suspect numbers get recycled because the first 8 are essentially bank numbers, so you are left with 8 numbers to created new CC numbers for. It's hard to say these days. I personally have not had any issues with my bank card, but my personal debit card I have had issues here and there.
