Fraudulent Credit Card use

From: "Han"

| Received a call from Sears Mastercard (Citibank) questioning charges to my | CC. I haven't used the card much at all in all the nyears I had it. | Lately once in July, once in Sptember, then once at Kmart around Christmas | time. I received the bill a few days back, paid it off online, today get | that call about a total of over (#)) $ in charges. | | How do "they" get my card number? Good thing they have some kind of | monitoring. I of course canceled the account - I have other cards. | | Just gives me the creeps ... |

Its a tough world out there Han.

Did you get an accounting of what those charges were and where (including locale) they were made ?

Han:

Last Spring I had fraudulent charges on my Advanta MasterCard and Sam's Discover. Advanta was a REAL PAIN about issuing me a credit, so I no longer use that card.

December, my Amex Blue was compromised. Yesterday, my Chase Business Visa was used by someone.

I just dispute the charges and have new cards issued.

Amex has been the BEST by far in handling the fraud. The charges never even made it to my statement.

Just a fact of life these days, but I have >50 credit cards, so I'm especially prone to fraud. Most cards sit in my desk, in fact, my Chase business had not been used for a couple of years.

Bob P.S. My phone bill also had a fraudulent charge from some shady outfit last month.

How do "they" get my card number? Good thing they have some kind of monitoring. I of course canceled the account - I have other cards.

Just gives me the creeps ...

Han wrote in news:Xns9A29D2B04F0CBikkezelf@199.45.49.11:

There are any number of ways a crook can get your number. They could steal the statement from your mailbox or a clerk could make a copy of the register receipt.

This is why I download all my credit card transactions into Quicken every few days. I want to know if my card is being used as soon as possible.

I've found bogus charges 4 times in 10 years. The most recent was when a vendor entered my number by mistake. Even though he reversed the charge the next day, my bank was more than happy to cancel the card and issue me another one. I have one card that I use exclusively for online purchases and have never has a problem. All the bogus charges were on a card I only use in person. I suspect some hotel clerk or waiter glommed my number.

"David H. Lipman" wrote in news:y7dkj.966$hk4.603@trnddc03:

No accounting yet (I doubt that I will get that). I'm to get a form with questions for an affidavit or something, and I'll be glad to fill that out if it will help get the crook in jail.

(Of course someone could have transposed some digits in the credit card HE has).

"Bob Wang" wrote in news:wNKdnWFmHtlC4gzanZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com:

No experience (yet) with Amex. Citibank has always been good with this sort of thing. The Sears credit cards are managed by Citibank.

Porter Smith wrote in news:Xns9A2A2C1D1011myport2000yahoocom@127.0.0.1:

I download banking data almost daily, but 1) This card was not set for auto download, since I use it so seldom, and 2) These were charges for fairly large amounts in a single day. As mentioned, the card isn't used for many charges and certainly never has been used for thousands. So it should have been easy to flag this as potentially fraudulent.

Seems to be a common problem with Citibank. Samething happened to my AT&T Universal (I don't actively use). They closed the account automattically and mailed me a new Card and an affadavit. Didn't get any bills from them.

Not that CC fraud isn't a huge problem in general these days, but I believe Citibank had some sort of security breach some months back. I had *two* Citibank cards compromised within a month or so of each other. The first time, Citibank sent me a letter saying that had reason to believe my account had been compromised and were thus issuing me a new card. (I'd seen no bogus transactions.) The replacement CC was compromised a few weeks later, and I found out when two mailorder companies called me to confirm the transactions. (They were suspicious even though Citibank had authorized the charges, because (1) I was not a customer of those companies, and (2) the merchandise was to be shipped to a third-party address. When I immediately called Citibank, it took quite a bit to convince them it was the replacement card I wanted closed due to fraud. They thought I was talking about the first card, closed weeks before! But when I finally convinced them to go through the impending transactions, there were a few more bogus ones, which they voided immediately.

Now I download my Quicken transactions daily, but it does take a bit before transactions actually appear. I was lucky that those companies were suspicious and called me immediately. What blew me away, is that Citibank went ahead and authorized "ship to third party" transactions seemingly w/o a second thought. I *always* ship to my billing address (home), and I'd never used those companies. So this purchasing behavior was not typical of me.

Anyway, I went ahead and put a fraud alert on my credit reports, which will expire in a few days. And *that* makes me a little nervous.

Regards,

Margaret

Margaret wrote in news:rbGdnaj9NfHNEA7anZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com:

I do send things to third parties (family all over), but I also had some problem like that eons ago. I don't recall which business it was that called to ask whether it was OK to wait with shipping the expensive thing I had ordered. It was out of stock, and it was going to go to the other coast (not NJ). I canceled the account, and later found out that someone had hacked the customer list of the company, complete with CC numbers. Canceled the credit card too.

I sometimes check my Quicken downloads twice a day ..., but yes, there are 2 delays, first the time between apoproval and posting, then the delay to "get" the transactions to the server serving Quicken - the FI's website usually has things about a day ahead of that.

I'll double the comments about AMEX Blue. I use it constantly for everything I can to build the biggest annual rebate I can.

Last year on a day trip, my wife and I were at a Leesburg VA restaurant for lunch, about 20 miles from home. THAT EVENING I got a call from AMEX fraud desk questioning me about several charges and did I make these purchases. Nope, didn't spend $400 at InPhonic, didn't spend $150 at somebody's gym and didn't buy gas at nowhere near here Virginia. While I can not be absolute, I fully believe someone at that restaurant grabbed the card numbers and information

I THINK the Inphonic charge tripped AMEX because they had not yet authorized it. Cancelled my card, had a new one in two business days and never heard a word more about it. The Leesburg restaurant charges came through about three months later and since I DID have lunch there, I paid it without protest.

They were top notch in my view. I think ALL the CC majors have some scanners that run and compare past charges and classification of retailers to what's coming in but AMEX handling was great.

BeanTownSteve wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@q39g2000hsf.googlegroups.com:

Well, I can't be out of my main card for 2 days, certainly not when I am on vacation in the wilds of Holland, and not anywhere near my home phone. Luckily, my cards have continued to work properly in those and similar circumstances. Nevertheless, I have been grateful whenever unauthorized charges were made to my cards, and intercepted before I had a problem. I think that most of the time, the system works properly.