Credit Card Fraud or "Yay! All my money has been stolen".

[Keith]

They should've stopped your card there and then mate - if they didn't I'd be back on the phone if I were you.

[fallenangle]

My sympathy too.

It's seems very poor banking security practice not to automatically flag and act on a customers account being cleared so suddenly unless you regularly go up to your overdraft limit. It should have been seen as very suspicious. When my (credit) cards were done the providers security picked up on it immediately and blocked any further unusual transactions even before I was first informed of the problem.

[RobDimmock]

Digging this age old thread up. Tried to use my debit card on the 'net and tried to withdraw money wouldn't let me. Rang Abbey said i've been a victim of a fraudulent transaction:S. Of £1.00, how does that work? So anyway have to wait for a new card and pin numebr before I can spend my wages without having to go into the bank... Yaay!

[eastyy]

i work in a credit card company

Basically fraudsters will try small transactions first (i tunes is popular ) to see if it works then they will try for a large transactions or perhaps sell the details on.,...often i hear of customers living in england victims of this....when there is suddenly there card used in america or china

So many ways they can get hold of your details ....fake atms....people skimming cards (common when people pay for stuff in hotels and restaraunts when you give the person your card) statements

I always advise people particualry if you have been the victim of fraud to check the credit reports ...such as from experian i think it only costs a couple of quid to get a report

[buster_broon]

add my name to the list, but lucky my bank blocked it

for some reason which my bank believe was a masked website as i'm normally pretty good, somebody called Terence moved all my money into 1 account and tried to send a bank transfer to himself

luckily Lloyds saw suspicious activity and blocked my account

fecker

[randombs]

A few hours ago I got a call from HSBC's Anti-fraud Hit Squad (at least, that's what I'd call them, the lovely bunch they are) about my credit card, saying they've blocked two suspicious transactions on Paypal.

I logged on to check and, sure enough, two eBay items (a pair of gold coins for £1000 and a canon lens for £770) were paid-for using my credit card. The gold coins was done today so I was able to cancel it myself by clicking the button, but the other one was on 2nd Nov.

More worryingly, there was a third payment using bank transfer for £550, and I quickly got on the phone to HSBC bank to find out what I could do.

Paypal uses Direct Debit for bank transfers, so the nice lady on the phone confirmed that there was a DD for £550 due to go through tomorrow, which she promptly cancelled.

She also flagged my account to not accept any DD's from Paypal at all, which should stop this happening in the future. Of course, that could be an issue when I actually do want to use Paypal myself, but recently I've been getting into the habit of using the credit card to pay for Paypal payments instead of the bank account, and this wouldn't be affected by the DD flagging.

Ok so that was sorted but guess what? Within literally a few minutes of putting the phone down, Paypal called me to find out what the shizzle had been going down, so I told them and now everything's looking rosy.

I was just telling my parents about it and my dad asked the obvious question - didn't you get the emails? And no, I didn't get any Paypal emails at all! The problem is, I'm not sure if whoever did this temporarily added another email address and had the confirmations sent there or not.

I wish these sites incorporated some sort of log that you could access that tells you exactly what's been going on (e.g. 15:00 - added email address).

Because frankly, it's all well and good having transactions reversed, but not even having a rough idea about how it happened in the first place doesn't help to prevent it happening again. So I've no idea if they got my password through some trojan, by going through the forgotten password process, or some other new-fangled hack, and that's the worst thing for me as I'm really paranoid about this sort of stuff.

[funkydan]

I would suggest changing your Ebay/Paypal passwords Billy. And your email password too, if you use web-based email. Just to be on the safe side!

[Brad]

How good was you password? just letters, letters and numbers or letters, number AND symbols?

[randombs]

My passwords are imo super-duper bullet-proof. Mixture of letters, numbers and symbols (depending on what the site allows), and never English words, about 10 digits in length on average. I changed the passwords for both today. The only thing I can think of is maybe a keylogger or something. Add to that it coincides with my Windows reinstall, don't know if something got installed while I was setting up my antivirus and whatnot.

My eBay account wasn't fiddled with, by the way, just the Paypal (the eBay account used to pay for the things was a different one).

I'm gonna admit that, due to some voodoo magic or the aligning of the planets or something, my Hotmail and Paypal passwords were the same, which I know is a big no-no.

[gunrock]

Add to that it coincides with my Windows reinstall, don't know if something got installed while I was setting up my antivirus and whatnot.

This is the most likely explanation. I reinstalled Win2k a couple of years ago and before my firewall and virus got installed (and it has to be connected to the net to do so! ) a load of viruses got installed within minutes of the machine being up after the installation and connected to the net.

[Kongster]

A decent firewall and keeping your OS updated with the latest patches an security fixes is a must. Keep a back up of these before doing a clean reinstall.

[fallenangle]

I was recently thinking of verfying my Paypal account but when I saw they wanted all my bank details, account numbers and sort codes etc I thought better of it. At least when its 'only' a credit card it's not too disasterous. I'd be stuffed if hundreds of pounds disappeared from my bank account.

When my cards were done I am fairly sure it was some online fraud and only Amazon and Paypal had info on both. Since then I've kept all online stuff to only one card and of course changed all passwords etc.

I've tried to cancel them but you know what retailers are like about removing even erroneous details from their database but I'm still receiving catalogues addressed to the name the fraudster used (same initials). It's a good reminder of how pissed off I was when it happened. I feel for anybody who suffers the same thing.

[randombs]

Well the thing is, when I did a clean install of XP a few months back (sp3 slipstream jobby. My XP is a retail student/teacher Pro) I set everything up and installed all the drivers, basic apps (office, msn, firefox, etc) and I'd installed and set up my Kaspersky 2009 and the Windows Firewall was enabled, too. Once all that was done I made an image and this is the image I restored over the weekend, so I'm wondering if that really was the case.

When I'm doing proper clean installs of Windows, I'll leave the wifi switched off completely until the AV is installed anyway just to be sure. What bugs me is Avast found some trojans that Kaspersky didn't, but the whole reason I bought Kaspersky was because Avast just seems to deal with viruses, not malware and the like. I'm back on Avast now, though, because it's less resource-hungry and just gets on with it.

I've been considering trying Linux out, and although I need Windows for a bunch of things, I could probably run it virtualised when necessary with Linux being the main OS (or vice-versa). Haven't decided yet, and I wouldn't want this to be the reason behind it.

[Mayhem]

I was recently thinking of verfying my Paypal account but when I saw they wanted all my bank details, account numbers and sort codes etc I thought better of it. At least when its 'only' a credit card it's not too disasterous. I'd be stuffed if hundreds of pounds disappeared from my bank account.

That's why I started a new account with bugger all in and refusal on taking it into the red to link into my Paypal account...

[fallenangle]

That's why I started a new account with bugger all in and refusal on taking it into the red to link into my Paypal account...

Clever idea.