Credit Card Fraud

[Frank Manning]

We had telephone messages about one of our joint cards two days running, so in the end fearing it wasn't a scam after all I phoned the provider this morning to be told that there had been several transactions on line. It seems that someone has obtained the card number, validity dates, and CVV, and starting off with £10 tried eventually to buy something valued over £4,000. The provider stopped the card at the second transaction which was in any case over the credit limit.

Sue uses a wireless lap top running from our home hub, and had bought 3 smallish items on line over the past 3 days and one telephone purchase. The latter has now arrived, and one on line purchase. The cards have been stopped and cut up, but it has left me wondering where the security leak is.

[david63]

... but it has left me wondering where the security leak is.

It could be anywhere - better off not trying to analyse it too much as you will end up just going round in circles. Leave to the credit card company - they are the experts and have the resources to look into it.

[Dark Knight]

I had this a while back with a brand new credit card
I had used it twice, once in the post office and once in a petrol station in Manchester
I got a call from the card company asking if I had been to Canada the day before, obviously not, so they said , somebody had tried a small $20 purchase to check if the card would process and once this cleared they tried to use it 15 times, to pay for all sorts of stuff with delivery addresses in India
I rang the police and explained the situation and guess what the petrol station were done for cloning people's cards as they had been doing it for months
the police advised they were prosecuting the people involved, good job the CC company were vigalant

[Jan Rosser]

Frank I sympathise with your dilemma having just spent the last half hour trying to sort out what I felt was a very suspicious telephone call from Sky tv. Whoever it was informed me that I would be receiving a new Sky card - they had my name and address and telephone number which I confirmed was correct but when she asked me for my bank account details so that I wouldn't be charged for the new card I immediately thought no way would I give those details over the telephone and told her so and ended the call.

I contacted Sky through my online account and they confirmed that they had not contacted me and I should not give out any information of this sort.

It is obviously a scam but I wonder how many people are taken in by it. I will be speaking later to my mother who might be confused by a call of this nature although these days with her being so hard of hearing the poor dear probably will put the phone down anyway. Her punch line is always the same - "I'm 90 years of age and can't hear very well - I'll get my daughter to ring you". Joking aside it is people like her who are taken in by calls of this sort - it makes me so angry.

Hope everything is sorted out for you Frank - it's such a nuisance - new cards new PIN numbers etc. Still at least your credit card company were on the ball.

[Jan Rosser]

Apologies for my response being a bit off topic

[Frank Manning]

Apparently I now have to query the one small withdrawal which the provider let through and they will then put their detection people on to it. The cards have not been out of the house for about two weeks, because we only use them for on line and telephone purchases. This is because the credit limit is quite low and I figure that limits my exposure. It seems to have worked this time because the provider was on to it quite quickly.

It just shows that you cannot be too careful where these security things are concerned.

[Quizzical Bob]

My secretary/administrator was recently a victim of the NatWest cardless money scheme. Two new bank cards turned up in the post and when she queried her account it turned out that two lots of £300 had been removed from it. Apparently someone had phone the bank pretending to be her saying that they had lost the bank cards and had been given a code to enable them to withdraw £300. This nearly emptied her main account so they then asked for another £300 to be transferred from her other account and then withdrew that too! I don't know what the security questions are but they cannot be very strong. She has now gad the money refunded. The withdrawals were in Manchester and she lives locally in Hampshire.

[Dancing Queen]

I had some fraudulent activity on one of my cc a few years ago, I had only used the card ( or so I thought ) in one place in several months, so it seemed pretty logical how it had happened however the more I thought about it the more unlikely it seemed as I had actually been present when that purchase was made.

I drove myself mad trying to figure out "how" and came up with two solutions :

a) The card number had been cloned many months before and saved ... or

b) I had booked a hotel online via a booking agent where my cc number was required to secure the booking, providing I arrived at the hotel my cc would not be charged ( payment direct to the hotel upon checking out )

Now when I thought about this (b) seemed the logical answer, I give my card details to X, I then turn up at the said hotel so there is never any reason for the booking agent to ever make a charge against my cc .. I could be way way of the mark but it made sense to me, unfortunately even though I passed this information on to the cc fraud dept you never find out what actually happened.

[greenfish187]

Mine was not a credit card but my debit card.
Checking my account at the week end i noticed 4 transactions over 2 days for mobile top ups,i rang the bank who confirmed they were fraudulent and it is happening at the moment,anyway to cut a long story short they had claimed £180 since the end of july in £10 or £15 transactions usually 2 a day at the beginning or end of the month.
I have stopped paper statements on the banks advice .The bank credited the money back to me the next morning.
Just wish i knew how to stop this happening again

[Andrea S]

This happened to be 3 weeks ago on my debit card. My bank recently rang me about 10 transactions over 2 days which had been made without the card being present. 2 were genuine but 8 weren't.
Fortunately they were for small amounts and had somehow been picked up.
The first fraudulent purchases were £10 to O2 and EE phone companies, followed by £20 to the same companies. These transactions were repeated the next day. The £120 was immediately returned to my bank account and I have now filled in forms relating to this fraud. As they are companies I have never used I am at a loss how theses things happen.

[ChesterfieldJohn]

Mine was not a credit card but my debit card.
Checking my account at the week end i noticed 4 transactions over 2 days for mobile top ups,i rang the bank who confirmed they were fraudulent and it is happening at the moment,anyway to cut a long story short they had claimed £180 since the end of july in £10 or £15 transactions usually 2 a day at the beginning or end of the month.
I have stopped paper statements on the banks advice .The bank credited the money back to me the next morning.
Just wish i knew how to stop this happening again

Greenfish, I cannot understand why the bank have advised you to stop paper statements, this is not usually how your details are obtained.
In fact the number on the back of your card is not documented there.

Looks to me that they just want to save the expense of paper statements and have used this has an excuse.

John

[Silver_Shiney]

This happens to my son-in-law on a regular basis and he can't understand how they keep getting the details of the replacement cards.

My Virgin security software is constantly telling me that it has intercepted an attempt to read my card details, even though I reformatted the computer last week and reinstalled from scratch! It MAY be a "false positive" but there's something funny going on.

[greenfish187]

That is exactly what happened to me the same company

[greenfish187]

This happened to be 3 weeks ago on my debit card. My bank recently rang me about 10 transactions over 2 days which had been made without the card being present. 2 were genuine but 8 weren't.
Fortunately they were for small amounts and had somehow been picked up.
The first fraudulent purchases were £10 to O2 and EE phone companies, followed by £20 to the same companies. These transactions were repeated the next day. The £120 was immediately returned to my bank account and I have now filled in forms relating to this fraud. As they are companies I have never used I am at a loss how theses things happen.

Thats exactly the same that happened to me.

[Frank Manning]

Does anyone know who these EE phone companies are? Is it just a repositry for cash sums in disguise? Two of mine were 'EEEC' I think.

[david63]

If you are referring to the phone company EE then see

If you are referring to the country code, then EE is Estonia

[Andrea S]

EE is the changed name when 2 mobile phone companies merged. I'm not sure but think it was Orange and TalkTalk. I have had no dealings with either company.
Nowadays most card transactions are through a machine so no one else actually handles my card. Any on line payments I make are for purchases to reputable companies which I consider should be safe.
A similar situation occurred with me many years ago when your card was swiped and you received a paper copy. A person was charged and they had taken my card details off a thrown away copy of a purchase. A lesson was quickly learnt

[Frank Manning]

Its them EE, and the CC Co have left one on my statement so I can query it and their fraud people will try to trace it. I think it is someone in one of the companies which Sue made on line purchases from, because the card is not used for much else.

We shred all receipts and bank slips after 2 months. Unless they are needed for guarantee purposes.

At least I have an excuse to curtail on line card expenditure for a while

[Kendhni]

Mine was not a credit card but my debit card.
Checking my account at the week end i noticed 4 transactions over 2 days for mobile top ups,i rang the bank who confirmed they were fraudulent and it is happening at the moment,anyway to cut a long story short they had claimed £180 since the end of july in £10 or £15 transactions usually 2 a day at the beginning or end of the month.
I have stopped paper statements on the banks advice .The bank credited the money back to me the next morning.
Just wish i knew how to stop this happening again

Greenfish, I cannot understand why the bank have advised you to stop paper statements, this is not usually how your details are obtained.
In fact the number on the back of your card is not documented there.

Looks to me that they just want to save the expense of paper statements and have used this has an excuse.

John

Not necessarily, paper statements are now considered a significant weakness in the security chain since there are several events whereby the information could be obtained (pre-delivery, sitting about, post-disposal). By going online it closes many of those events and technically provides more security.

[lioness]

Over the last year I have been trying to reclaim some PPI, but eventually the Ombudsman decided that my claim was too long ago. Fine.

Yesterday while I was at work, my husband received a call from what he thought was the company who had been trying to get my PPI back. They said they now had an offer for me, but they needed some more details. He smelt a rat and asked for the persons name and phone number, but they said they would call back. Hmmm

[Romig1]

Out of the blue, we received replacement credit cards from our issuer, a week or so ago. They said that my account was one of a number which had been suspected of being at risk of fraud. Can't think why it should have been, but Wina says they arrived soon after we applied for our ESTA cards.

[Quizzical Bob]

Out of the blue, we received replacement credit cards from our issuer, a week or so ago. They said that my account was one of a number which had been suspected of being at risk of fraud. Can't think why it should have been, but Wina says they arrived soon after we applied for our ESTA cards.

Had you applied through the official ESTA site or through an agent?

[Wina G]

Out of the blue, we received replacement credit cards from our issuer, a week or so ago. They said that my account was one of a number which had been suspected of being at risk of fraud. Can't think why it should have been, but Wina says they arrived soon after we applied for our ESTA cards.

Had you applied through the official ESTA site or through an agent?

We applied through the official ESTA site, the Tour Operator had supplied a link to it ... 14 US$ pp

[Romig1]

Out of the blue, we received replacement credit cards from our issuer, a week or so ago. They said that my account was one of a number which had been suspected of being at risk of fraud. Can't think why it should have been, but Wina says they arrived soon after we applied for our ESTA cards.

Had you applied through the official ESTA site or through an agent?

We applied through the official ESTA site, the Tour Operator had supplied a link to it ... 14 US$ pp

Ow much??? We have to pay them to let us in????

[david63]

Out of the blue, we received replacement credit cards from our issuer, a week or so ago. They said that my account was one of a number which had been suspected of being at risk of fraud. Can't think why it should have been, but Wina says they arrived soon after we applied for our ESTA cards.

Had you applied through the official ESTA site or through an agent?

We applied through the official ESTA site, the Tour Operator had supplied a link to it ... 14 US$ pp

Ow much??? We have to pay them to let us in????

Wait until you see how much they charge to let you out