Hi nameslave, I'm going to hold off on mentioning the registrar for now. They have been helpful for both of us in the past, so posting them would almost be giving them a bad rap. Something like this should not have happened, i'm not sure how they messed this up, but yes it is pretty bad.
When it comes to using your credit card online, you are pretty safe as long as you don't have a trojan or a keylogger on your computer. My friend suspects that he has a trojan on his computer, so that is his primarly reason he does not feel safe. Although in his case, he probably wouldn't put his credit card online even on a 100% clean pc. He is stubborn when it comes to that.