been there. done that. have the t-shirt. :/
I noticed that on my very first visit to the Netherlands. Many shops just don't accept credit card and that was very strange to me on my first visit. My only use case for debit card was to get cash out of ATM until then. So, I was really surprised to see that everybody uses debit card everywhere. And I was told that credit card is mainly used for online booking and traveling.
Note to Americans: In European countries this tends not to be a thing afaik. Privacy is taken more seriously, so there is no central & privatized system to query for credit. However, to rent an apartment, get a loan or get a new job here in Switzerland it's often required to provide something like a credit register extract from the local government office. That register will get notified when someone isn't paying bills, usually after the third notification ~2 months after a bill was issued (notifying the register is costing fees, so businesses try to avoid it as much as possible). After a couple of years, entries get deleted. This way there is an attempt of balancing privacy, social mobility and the interest of businesses to collect their revenue.
Where does that "free" money come from? From the payment network fees, of course. Mastercard takes a 4%-ish cut, the bank keeps 3% of that, and 2% of that goes back in my pocket. Banks have to offer such benefits because they will get cannibalized by the other players if their card can't compete.
Structurally, it's actually quite stupid that there's an invisible tax which you can only recover by playing ball with the creditors... but on an individual level you would have to be foolish to not take advantage.
My bank, and I believe most banks in the Netherlands, requires proof of stable income well above minimum wage before even considering an application for a credit card. This puts credit cards out of reach of a sizable part of the population.
Also, credit checks and reporting new lines of credit to the authorities by lenders are mandatory for all personal loans, be it for getting a mortgage, issuing a credit card, paying monthly installments for a smartphone bundled with a contract, or buying on credit from Dutch online stores or mail order catalogues.
I have a credit card here and only use it for international transactions[0], it has a fairly low limit to the point where if I'm, say, booking long-haul flights I need to pre-load it with money which fortunately only takes moments. This is partly by choice - as it's automatically paid off each month, I want to ensure I can never put more on it than will be in my bank account - but also that was the default limit when I got it.
[0] local online transactions pretty much always use a system (iDeal) that goes via your bank website.
Personally, I only tend to use credit cards for larger purchases (flights, hotels, etc) because you get some better protections if things go wrong.
Shortly after I relocated from the Netherlands to Australia, my house was broken into and my Dutch debit card stolen. The bank would only send my new card to my local branch, which was 20,000km away. And none of my friends could pick it up because they insisted on verifying my id.
Very frustrating...
Pretty secure I suppose, except in the OP’s case, where it was sent to an old address. And they wouldn’t update it over the phone? So they essentially gave some strangers access to his bank account.
Some years back I moved to a different city. About a year later I wanted to make a purchase with my credit card. I found out it had expired. I rang the bank and asked for a new one. They promised to send it to me. It never arrived. Rang again, got the same promise, and still no card. When I called them the third time, the employee found out my old address was still in their database. Turns out the credit card department had a different client database then the debit card department (who had my new address).
To change my address, I had to log in to their site. They weren't allowed to change it on the phone. As soon I tried to log in, I noticed I forgot my password. When I clicked 'reset password', there was a new surprise: they send the new password by snail mail.... to the old address of course!
So I had to go in person to the house I used to live in and explain the situation. I asked them to ring me when the letter with my name on it arrived on their doorstep. Luckily the people who now live in my old house were very nice and gave me the letter!