Credit Card Fraud [Archive]

21 Feb 2008, 1:24am

I was just a victim of credit card fraud. I went to pay my bill today and noticed I had about $2000 more on the card then before. So I looked at the transactions and yep, a whole bunch of charges I did not make. stuff like a payment to T-mobile for $500, carrerbuilder.com for 249.00, comcast cable.(I have WOW cable) for 194. dominos pizza in florida, some fruit market in NJ. And list goes on.

Thankfully I have credit card protection on the card and I'm not liable for any of it. but OMG. You think it will never happen to me, but NOPE it does. So now I have to fill out an affidavit and other paper work to get this cleared up.

I think I will try and track this guy down via the t-mobile payment. The payment has to be linked to a phone number.

Has this ever happen to anyone else, and what happen.

Black Hawk

21 Feb 2008, 1:29am

Not yet. I've only had my cards for a little over a year. I do check my transactions regularly online.

You should be able to get info from any of those purchases, especially Comcast since obviously it was to a physical direction.

Lincoln

21 Feb 2008, 2:26am

Yikes, sorry man. :-/

airbornflght

21 Feb 2008, 3:02am

Well, that credit card protection plan is nothing more than fear mongering. Because thanks to consumer protection laws, you are only liable for up to $50.00 of charges on a stolen credit card. And that is only if more than $50 of charges are made before you inform the company. If you inform the company a card was stolen and THEN thousands of dollars of charges appear you aren't liable for any of it.

They really are playing off of your fear to earn $3-4 a month extra. You are insuring a risk you can afford to take. Beucause lets say your credit card gets stolen once every 18 months, albeit obscene, lets just hypothesize.

You pay $4 a month for "protection" $4 * 18 months = $72
or
your card gets stolen and it reaches the credit limit, you call the company, and according to the laws, you are liable for $50.

So, it would be $22 cheaper to just take it as it comes.

primesuspect

21 Feb 2008, 3:55am

stop visiting those leather fetish porno sites! That'll teach you!

No, it's happened to me twice. Once for several thousand, and just recently (a month ago) for small amounts - 4 separate charges of $23~

I was liable for neither.

jared

21 Feb 2008, 7:23am

Just happened to my pops a couple of weeks ago on his mastercard.

~3k in charges in 2 days. MC contacted him when things started to look fishy and blocked the rest.

I swear, the interweb these days. :rolleyes:

Leonardo

21 Feb 2008, 8:13am

I swear, the interweb these days.Or your trash, or the waitress that walks away from table with your card, or the store.... The latest I'm hearing is that most stolen credit card numbers are not being exfiltrated from online activity.

What really scares me is news stories - becoming more frequent - about government workers losing laptops with hundreds of thousands profiles - names, ID's, financial information. Credit card theft is a hassle, but identity theft! Much worse.

Kwitko

21 Feb 2008, 1:56pm

Happened to me too recently. I wasn't liable for any of it. The card was canceled by the issuer before the charges were approved.

RADA

21 Feb 2008, 2:09pm

[QUOTE=Leonardo]Or your trash, or the waitress that walks away from table with your card, or the store.... [QUOTE]

Leo has this one exactly right....

I had my credit card number stolen twice while living in Tucson.

Both times it was after I had made a purchase at a store.

Both times the thief used the credit card at stores around Tucson. I had iron-clad alibis as to why I hadn't made the purchases...

First time I was in Boston buying dinner for my family about 5 seconds after one of the fraudulent charges was added to my card..

..second time I was 3 months in Saudi Arabia with the Air Force on a six month deployment....

FYI: (SHILL ALERT!!!)

I use Lifelock credit protection now. Great product...

primesuspect

21 Feb 2008, 2:22pm

You hear about these "data thefts" of millions of credit card numbers with these huge data mine companies, this is the result. Shopping online is actually probably safer than shopping in a physical store as far as data theft is concerned.

Leonardo

21 Feb 2008, 3:50pm

I use Lifelock credit protection now. Great product...I have been considering that. Credit card theft can be dealt with. Identity theft can take years to clean up.

shwaip

21 Feb 2008, 4:16pm

If anyone else is concerned about their credit card security, please private message me your credit/debit card number and pin. I'll need the cvv2 code as well. I'll get back to you in a week.

My cc lets me generate balance limited numbers that have a very short amount of time they're valid, and can only be used at one online store. It's quite nice.

21 Feb 2008, 5:36pm

mas0n

21 Feb 2008, 11:14pm

I lost my wallet last night; fell out of my gym shorts as I was getting into the car. Went back 15 minutes later and it was gone. I've reported all cards as missing, but I'm really hoping there are no future comments from me in this thread!

MrBill

23 Feb 2008, 3:31am

I haven't had any credit card issues, but someone used my wife's maiden name (we had already been married for 20 years!) and social security number for a residential telephone. They ran up $900 worth of charges over the course of a year. It was reported to the credit reporting agencies and we didn't find out about it until purchasing our house in Missouri. We had just bought a house in Tennessee 9 months earlier and nothing was mentioned about it.

What was really weird, is that when we found out about it, the charges were already 4 years old

We had to put $900 in an esgrow account while we were trying to get it cleared up. I called the title company about 6 months after closing on our house in Missouri as we thought the matter was settled because it had been removed from my wife's credit report and they sent us a check for the $900. 18 months later we get a notice from a collection agency for the same fraudulent charge. Apparently, the phone company sold the account instead of closing it and we had to go through the whole fraud process again. We were required to file a police report before the collection agency would even consider it as fraud. I probably got as mad as I had even been in my life talking to the collection agency! This time we did get a notification IN WRITING that it was fraud and we were not repsonsible for the charges.

We placed a fraud alert on both my wife's credit report and on mine.

The thing we had a tough time proving was that my wife did not live in Virginia where the charges were made. We didn't keep any utility bills from 4-5 years ago.

It is very beneficial for married people to have utility bills in both names, and keep them for several years, should it become necessary to prove place of residence.

Shorty

24 Feb 2008, 11:49am

I had this a couple of months ago. Someone bought 2 guitars, several PC components and plain ticket to Detroit on mine! The wierd thing was all this stuff turned up at my address, I just don't understand it?

;)

primesuspect

24 Feb 2008, 8:04pm

The nerve!

Qeldroma

24 Feb 2008, 9:04pm

Have not had an ID theft yet, but my wife had her wallet stolen on a vehicle break-in and another time one of the help at a childrens' dental office filched it right out of her purse when she wasn't looking.

Lifelock is an option we're also looking at. I think that hoping for "security by obscurity" is running a little thin in this day and age.