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[FullLeatherJacket]

On Friday we had a letter from a supermarket about possible misuse of our credit card. This is the one with the low credit limit with which we do any on-line shopping. The letter said that they had tried to contact us (but not how or when) and asked me to ring, so I did. I was told that someone had tried to use my card number to pay for downloading music, but that they had put a hold on the transaction. I confirmed that neither Liz nor I had tried to downloaded any music and the person said they would cancel that card and set up a new one with a new number.
I wondered how anyone had obtained my number - my PC is stuffed with anti-trojan gizmos and hacker killers - and how the supermarket were clever enough to intercept an on-line transaction, but thought no more of it..........until I  had a phone call from a spotty herbert in another of the supermarket's departments about half an hour later, trying very clumsily to sell me insurance against I/D Theft...for £69.95 a year!
Now my question is pretty simple. Is this a new type of marketing i.e. whereby you contrive a fake situation in order to frighten your customer into buying something he probably doesn't need? As I pointed out to Spotty Herbert when he told me the first 30 days were FREE, I've had a lot more than 30 days up to date without any problems, so why the hell should I suddenly want to part with seventy quid?
In similar vein I've long held the theory that anti-virus software companies employ at least 50% of their staff to write viruses, but after this latest exciting adventure I'm beginning to wonder if my paranoia isn't actually reality!
Has anyone else had one these letters/calls?
FLJ

Post modified to remove identification of trader about whom allegations were being made, this to protect Mayhem.

[John W E]

Hi there Dave and all

We have just had a rotten 3 weeks of exactly the same thing, the only difference was ours was one of the debit cards to our main bank Account.   

First I was asked what I had spent 588.00 squids on after we were convinced we hadnt spent that much money on any modelling material - and the Mrs had gone on a shopping spree - this was on a Thursday night - then I rang the main branch of the bank and spoke to the girl there and when they checked there was a lot more money being taken from our account in the thousands - S**t myself - yes - and felt very sick - the bank obviously locked everything down for us on our accounts - then we had to go down to the bank on the Friday to find out from them that (and they had checked back through our account) small amounts had at first been taken funnily enough for music downloads.... a couple of pound here and there for IPod download music off the web at first.

Then when we got home, we had a letter from the fraud dept of the bank waiting for us - brought by the morning post.

The letter to us looked it could have come from anyone - so I rang the bank up to confirm that because in the contents of the letter it said - any communications with the fraud/bank we were to quote Operation *********   it turned out that the letter was genuine, and to cut a long story short, the bank had noticed before we had, they had seen the small 588 squids withdrawals but stopped the withdrawal that would have cleaned us out in the account.

We were advised by the bank fraud dept., that fraudsters can obtain your personal details in numerous ways.   One major way is ordering online and as you can imagine at that time I felt quite sick at the thought of it - so now being extra vigilant. 

I was quite tight before, try and get money oot of me noo.      Also, just round about the time the first monies came out of our account - I received a phonecall asking if my wife was in the house, because she had applied OnLine for a beauty treatment course - and they required her details, address, and everything to send her the information pack and also to confirm she lived at this address.    When we mentioned this to the fraud people, they said had we had any 'funny' phone calls....and we thought of the above phonecall  which we were laughing at - as I expected a 'Cement mixer' at the door for the Mrs.....owch!!!! but she confirms she never even went on any website for the beauty stuff.    This is one way the bas****s get your postcode and details confirmed when they ring and ask for you...according to the fraud staff.

We have been lucky and have now received a large percentage of the monies refunded....

One Sick as a Parrot
Bluebird
aye

[Colin Bishop]

I don't think it's just online ordering that puts you at risk. A lot of websites have separate payment handling services which means that they don't see your card details anyway. Anyone who takes your card details, shop, petrol station, website, restaurant or travel agent etc. can misuse the details if they are so inclined. We have had some instances of identity fraud, usually involving on line betting which the bank picked up and blocked the transaction. A restaurant in the States put our meal bill through twice hoping we wouldn't notice and we've twice received replacement cards through the post where the envelope has been obviously tampered with which required a block and re issue.

A colleague of mine had her handbag stolen in a restaurant and within hours somebody in Russia had cleaned out her account, she got the money back but it caused a lot of distress and hassle. There is a lot more of this sort of thing going on than people realise - you can tell by the slick responses the banks have adopted.

[barriew]

I have now changed my bank and credit card accounts to ones where I can check them online, which I do every other day or so.
I also try to pay online only via Paypal or Protex or one of the other processing companies which means my details don't go to the supplier. 

Barrie

[chingdevil]

I have had similar problems, last year I got hit for about £2k over a week on a credit card at an on line gambling site. Whoever had my details, and they had them all according to the web site security the only thing being wrong was my date of birth. It was easy to prove it was not me as I was not in the country at the time. It is quite scary as I shred all documents that contain any details about me or my wife, according to this web site security they had had a problem with accounts being set up using a very large, well known companies e-mail system.

About five years ago my wife had her handbag stolen, that took eighteen months to sort out I lost count how many companies were going to send the bailiffs around because a cheque had bounced. I never use cheques now, while all this was going on we used to get the cheques returned to us that had bounced, my dog could have forged my wife's signature better than the idiot who had the cheque book. It was obvious that the stores were not checking the signature, so it is possible that there were people in these stores helping the crooks.

Damm all their families!!!


Brian

[bigford]

i got you all beat

  i get a call with the same story,somebody tryed to use my credit card  and was it me.
and all i had to do is  give them my info to stop the transaction.  i asked the lady if
she was awear of the fact that i no longer had the card. she hung up the phone

[Bunkerbarge]

I have now changed my bank and credit card accounts to ones where I can check them online, which I do every other day or so.
I also try to pay online only via Paypal or Protex or one of the other processing companies which means my details don't go to the supplier. 

Barrie

The trouble with paypal is that your accoubnt remains quite limited when you start out having a max transaction and only up to 1000.00 pounds for the year.

To be able to spend more you need to verify the account.  This entails linking your paypal account to your normal bank account.  Are they serious?  They expect us to give them access to our normal bank account for Paypal transactions?

The real scam is though that Paypal put pressure on sellers by telling them that they won't guarrantee the transaction unless it is from a verified account!!!  Consequently sellers are now demanding that your Paypal account be verified, i.e. linked to your bank account before they will sell you stuff.  I can't actually believe that such tactics are legal but it is certainly immoral and manipulative.

Needless to say I refuse point blank to link Paypal to my own bank account.

[portside II]

I dont find it a problem now with linking my bank account to my paypal acc ,recently i ordered some tooling for my lathe on e-bay and paid with my paypal acc ,the trasnsaction took 9 working days to put through even though the monie had gone from my account on the first day ,i queried paypal why as i normaly use my card to pay paypal ,they told me the reason was that my card had expired .
now i check my bank on line reguarly so if there's something wiered going on i will see it .
daz

[bigfella]

I have a separate account that has a Visa Debit card. This is the only account I give to Paypal it only has about $5 in it unless I am buying something at the time. I transfer from my regular account at the time I want to use Paypal. Although some one has tried to scam 30k Swedish Kroner out of my account using the Visa card number, but my bank are aware of my low balance system and advised me. What the scampers had worked out was my banks Algorithm they used for the Visa Card number and tried it on. The bank have since issued me with another card and used an other Algorithm.

Just cant trust Credit Cards so I use debit cards, if the money is not there then they cant get it.

Regards David

[Jonty]

  Keep your wits about you in the supermarkets as well. My brother's partner noted that in the Teddington Tesco her bill was £20 more than it should have been. 'Oh', said the clerk, all innocently, 'I thought you wanted a cashback'.

[Captain Povey]

I think this includes phone companies and internet providers too. I recently received a threatening letter from a debt collecting agency about an unpaid mobile phone bill for a phone that was not mine. Apparently the account had been set up using my date of birth. So how did that happen? I do not give that date out freely now. After a couple of phone calls, faxes and emails it was sorted but it did make me think about identity theft so I am expecting a call from someone about that soon. I also had a lot of trouble with my internet provider who accused me of spamming and threatened to cut me of. Again after some phone calls I got the impression that somebody had accessed the account and I wonder who that was. They also in my opinion created problems with my anti virus because they wanted me to use a competitors product that they were promoting. All very scary. Graham.

[dougal99]

Amazing that these companies assume every time that you are the villain. When I last sold a house the buyers solicitor combed the county court orders for people with my surname, that's all. No matching first name, birth date or address. I was then required to sign saying none of them was me. Goodness knows how long the list would have been if I had a more common name  ???

I thought at the time it was a scatter gun approach, but if all you need is a suraname...

Sleep tight

Doug

[Captain Povey]

Well I may be paranoid but I think they are all at it, banks as well. My dear wife, in an unguarded moment, replied to an email from 'her bank'. Fortunately she quickly realised the mistake and contacted the real bank and they immediately locked the account. So far all has been ok. However to unlock it they asked her to run Kaspersky free virus checker. Guess what it found loads of stuff that it could get rid of so did I want to buy the product. Well I ran Spybot and it did remove some stuff, Norton said it was clean, AVG said it was clean, aol said it was clean and Microsoft defender said it was clean. So I looked at the report which seem to contain a long list of, among other things my daughters photos and some Norton files that it probably did not like. The response from the bank was 'ok if you are happy it is clean we will unlock the account'. Was this a ploy to get me to buy more Anti virus or am I really paranoid? Graham

[Roger in France]

No Graham you are not paranoid. Come the revolution I would put the Clearing Banks to the wall first.

Yesterday I attempted to determine why my instructions to close my 2 accounts with on of the major banks issued in writing on 17 March to take effect on 27 March had not been acted upon. I told them the reason I was transferring to a building society was because the bank was so inefficient and had made mistakes with increasing regularity. I may add that I am/was a Premium Customer paying an extra fee for a "Personal Service".

They transferred me to a different person 5 times. One member of staff told me that my Personal Manager had left the bank; another said she was working in another dept.; another person said he was the personal assistant of the person who had left; they denied ever having had my letter of instruction; when I said it was sent Recorded and I had a signature for it they said that I had sent it to the wrong Dept.; when I showed them their Email telling me to which address to send it they said it was lost in the post; they then said start again to which I said, "No"; they said they would close all 3 accounts on my oral instruction; I said I only have 2 accounts; they said, "Ah, yes one has a zero balance".

Finally they said they would put everything right and call me back at 16:00 UK time yesterday. Today at 18:00 UK time still no call!

I am articulate and well versed in consumer protection and banking law. God help those who are not.

A plague on all their houses.

Roger in France.

[Colin Bishop]

Kaspersky has a good reputation as an AV program. I use Steganos which is essentially the same thing. These programs all find different things, some of which are only potentially a problem. I also use Windows Defender and Ad Aware.

Colin

[john strapp]

Similar theme, I've just found out that I have ordered an LCD flat screen TV from a mohammed somebody in New York city for £14.99p, now that is a bargain if wasn't a scam!

Next day I have seemingly ordered a Nokia phone at 400$ from somebody in Arkansaw, another scam.

I've now closed all bank accounts before they can get money out of me, and like bluebird, I'll be as tight as a ducks -----