Today (well yesterday to be precise), I became the victim of some pretty high tech credit card crime. Got a call at around 4pm from my bank, asking whether I had just used my credit card - the answer to which was no, why. "Well sir, when last did you use it?". Truth is that I last used in on Sunday 12th Nov, to buy some groceries. Holding the guy on the phone, I quickly logged into my bank account to pull a credit card statement, and sure enough, starting yesterday, there were five transactions, ranging in value from R75, to over R5000 - everything from Nando's Chicken burgers, to CD's and furniture - a total of over R10,000.
I'm not really annoyed at the amounts, as I know that the bank will refund the fraudulent transactions, but I am very irritated at the audacity of how it was done.
I suspect, and after talking to the credit card division at my bank, I'm fairly certain that my card was skimmed at a restaurant, and the details obtained from it were used to create a duplicate card. If the transactions were internet based, then this would not be the case, but because the card was used in store, there was definitely a duplicate card present at time of transaction.
So, looking further into it, I have narrowed it down to 4 possible restaurants - and I suspect that it was the one that K and I had lunch at last Saturday. Reason being, is that we know for sure that another restaurant in the complex has suffered the same fate, as they were investigated by a bank that a friend of ours used to work at.
If there's a lesson to be learnt, wherever possible, when paying for your meal make sure that the waitron brings a hand held point of sale to your table before handing over your card, or accompany them to the POS if there is no hand held available.
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2 comments:
At least with advances in computer software it is easier for banks to automatically spot the fraudulent transactions. I remember once paying for Eurostar tickets in Paris with my HSBC credit card, and 10 minutes later receiving a call from a call centre worker in India asking me if I had just spent ₤300. He freaked me out a bit because the time of the transaction he gave was about 4 hours in the future and the company name was SNCF. But we soon realised he was quoting the time the transaction was done in India and not Paris and of course SNCF is French rail.
PR
I also saw this today: Britain branded 'card fraud capital'
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21112006/356/britain-branded-card-fraud-capital.html
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