1. Home
  2. Financial Planning
  3. What's in it for them?

What's in it for them?

Under the premise that understanding and avoiding scams is relevant to financial planning, I'd like to relate a story to this audience and then ask the question that appears in the subject line of this post.

So several weeks ago I get a call from Citi's fraud department and they want me to call immediately because they think they've picked up fraudulent activity on my credit card. I called them and they told me about suspect transactions that were hitting my account and asked me if they were mine. Indeed, the transactions were not mine, so my account was closed and I received a new credit card with a new number. All this went down right when that big data breach happened at Heartland Payment Systems (they process credit card transactions amongst other things) so I'd guess that that was how my account was compromised.

Shortly afterwards, I started receiving some mailorder crap from fly-by-night companies, like that government grant CD scam that was reported about in Consumer Reports, a subscription for White Tea with Acai capsules, sera anti-aging creams, total cleanse pills, etc.

Lo and behold, when I received my monthly statement, I discovered that this mailorder crap had been charged to my account, and in fact, these were the very charges that tipped off Citi. Only two fraudulent charges did not result in something being shipped to me, a small charge to Napster and a ~$270 charge to Bluefly (now I get their marketing literature in the mail so they obviously have my address).

So if Citi is going to reverse the charges (and I presume they will not pay the mailorder companies), and I receive the products, what do the folks who perpetrated the fraud get out of all of this? Was this just for kicks?

Or perhaps someone is trying to give me a hint by sending me anti-aging cream... whoever it is also tried to send me an Ab Roller, but my account was already closed when the charge hit... Interestingly, I tried to call the White Tea company to tell them to cancel my subscription, but both phone numbers on their literature are dead. Hmmm.

-Will

william dot trice at ngc dot com

Reply to
Will Trice
Loading thread data ...

"So if Citi is going to reverse the charges (and I presume they will not pay the mail-order companies), and I receive the products, what do the folks who perpetrated the fraud get out of all of this? Was this just for kicks?"

Fishermen cast their nets realizing that they will drag-up much more than what will make them money at market. You represent a potion of undesirable catches that will be tossed back, many people won?t get a call from Citi or any other card co, others will catch the charges but may end up doing business with the merchants. If this tactic is being used, it?s working at some level?of the this you can be certain.

Reply to
Edify

Sounds more like an inside job to me Will. Someone who knows you and could write down your CC details is messing with you. Maybe that ex-girlfriend whom you told to not call you, coworker who did not like comments about his smelly socks, etc.

I hope that I am wrong.

i
Reply to
Igor Chudov

Except in OP's case the merchandise were sent to the OP, so whether Citi caught the bogus charges or not, the perpetrator wouldn't have gotten the merchandise because they were sent to the address of the cardholder.

Reply to
PeterL

I've heard, unconfirmed of course, that ID thieves are getting wiser. Many times they will test a card with small transactions to see if it gets caught by the system before spending the big bucks. It is also possible that there were charges that Citi did NOT catch as being out of the ordinary. Were I you, I'd double check my statement and look at all the charges and confirm every one of them.

Gene E. Utterback, EA, RFC, ABA

======================================= MODERATOR'S COMMENT: Please trim the post to which you respond. "Trim" means that except for a line or two of the previous post to add context, the previous post is deleted. Thank you.

Reply to
Gene E. Utterback, EA, RFC, AB

Will Trice wrote: [snip]

Whenever someone offers me a mint, I assume there was a reason for it. I don't ask a lot of questions, I just say "Thanks". HTH ;-)

Bob

Reply to
zxcvbob

Well, now that you put it this way, I wonder if the mailorder companies are somehow still getting paid? With the possible exceptions of Bluefly and Napster, these were all fly-by-night operations, one of them was even out of country (Great Britain). Could these fly-by-nights be in cahoots with the fraudsters? Does Citi still pay them in a case like this? Perhaps they just rack up a bunch of small charges and Citi gets stuck with the bill?

-Will

william dot trice at ngc dot com

Reply to
Will Trice

Indeed, I wrote here a long while back about a credit card company shutting off my card when I used it to buy a coke from a coke machine in the San Francisco airport (SF is not my home city). When I asked them why they shut it down it was for the very reason you cite above, they thought it might be a small test by ID thieves.

As to double-checking my statement, that's good advice. I balance my statements just like my checkbook each month against my credit card receipts anyway so I would have caught even small charges without Citi's help. But I still think it's cool that they caught the bad charges themselves.

-Will

william dot trice at ngc dot com

Reply to
Will Trice

Hey, was it you that sent me the Ab Roller?

-Will

william dot trice at ngc dot com

Reply to
Will Trice

Will, I have another WAG. Let's say you (you being "a criminal with a T3 line in Estonia") stumbled across some kind of site-referral scheme like: when someone clicks through Site A and orders from Site B, Site A gets $5 for every order for Site B's Stomach-izer with complimentary set of steak knives. Site A doesn't care where the thing ends up, just that an order is placed, so places 50 orders using stolen credit cards, but where the bill-to and ship-to are the same.

It's a nickel and dime kind of crime but think about it...Site B might know that their fraudulent order + return rate is say 5%, and they make $100 on every item because it's just some piece of junk made for 17 cents in Guangdong Dongguan. So they're willing to pay the $5 and eat any of your kind of orders...it would cost them more than $5 to reverse the charges or track down the offender - it's just a cost of doing business. Plus, Site B is worried more about the scenario of "bill to Will, ship to Estonia" - they don't think anyone will go through the trouble of submitting a fraudulent order just for the referral bonus. Hey, I think we just came up with a scheme here!

Or, WAG 1.1: Same scenario and site B is run by someone who just isn't thinking clearly. You hear these stories of people getting click-ad bills way over what they'd figured on, not realizing that there may be roomsful of Estonians paid to do nothing but sit and click links all day, so it's certainly possible.

-Tad

Reply to
Tad Borek

BeanSmart website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.