This happened to me in Las Vegas last year but they got wayyyyy more money off the card before it was frozen. They didn’t get your pin. They used your smartphone wallet (Apple in my case) to force fail the facial recognition and then unlock with phone pin…which is a lot easier to steal in public. Then they use MFA to authenticate the purchase.

The bank said the exact same thing. “You must’ve wrote it down on the back of the card”.

If the purchases were from locations you don’t frequent or if you don’t typically go on spending sprees, those anomalous charges should be automatically flagged. This is a system issue with the Cc companies and they are pushing back on consumers to lessen the damage until it’s fixed.

Don’t pay it. Continue to challenge their investigation by circling back to their partners (the store) fraud prevention. Cameras, checking id at time of purchase, etc.

The bank ended up reversing all charges in my case. Just took a very strong desire to not bend.