Credit card companies "assisting" fraudsters. Can I do anything more?

As the OP, I just want to further clarify. Firstly thanks for the interest in the issue.

1. I fully understand that the majority of chargeback queries probably result in the requestor subsequently recognising that it is a forgotten transaction. This isn't the case here. It is a company that secures credit card details and places a regular charge on the account until the account holder notices it and invokes the chargeback process. Probably it makes it's money on the people that fail to notice.

1. The chargeback process itself is not completely customer-centric. I cannot simply report the fraud online or over the telephone and then leave them to get on it with it. They insist on a written form be completed for each transaction separately. They insist that unless they receive the form back within 14 days of them sending it then they will "assume I do not wish to proceed" and drop the chargeback process which must be then started again. The post has been bad, it's taken 10 days for the forms to arrive with 4 left for them to receive them. I suspect I must start again going through the telephone process to get the forms. Trivial I know, but the customer must even pay for the return postage.

2. The core of my concern is that even though my own credit card company may be convinced that it is a fraudulent charge that there is no mechanism for them stopping future charges. They must accept any charge from any other credit card company.

1. Even if I cancel the card and a new card is issued my credit card company maintain that further charges on the old card remain my obligation until they are notified and the chargeback process is completed every time it occurs. I guess even if I were to unexpectedly die then my estate - unaware of the fraudulent nature of the card will continue to be depleted until the fraudster feels he has taken enough. The only hope they hold out is that the fraudulent company "gets fed up" with the chargebacks, or recognises that the constant chargebacks brings himself into higher attention and therefore might compromise his continued fraud - and cancels it himself.

2. I am most certainly the victim as I have already paid my credit card bill and have not yet been refunded and have had to "pay" for the chargeback process with my time and paid a permanent charge because of the cost of the stamp and apparently have a permenent forward obligation if I want this fraudulent debit refunded in the future.

The whole complaint therefore is that it seems that a customer in this situation isn't afforded the same protection he has with the direct debit guarantee and the ability of the customer to cancel it.

I hope this more clearly summarises the problem

If you're a UK resident, or if the financial service providers involved are UK-based, I would suggest that you take it up with the FSA/FOS

I work in IT support. I've seen both hardware and software faults cause problems which "can't happen". An obscure bug in a hashing algorithm once caused the previous unit to be used instead of the current one due to another bug in error handling code. A hardware fault caused mathematical operations to give the wrong result despite supposed parity checking everywhere.

OK, all the evidence relating to the transaction. The point is it could be hard to sort out.

It's not the same person. In all likelyhood the retailer has been been defrauded by someone using someone else's card details. The customer whose account is charged suffers the hassle of perhaps having 100 of his credit limit unavailable till it's sorted out (similar to above). And a phone call to report the transaction.

If he ends up suffering loss of money, *then* he is a victim of fraud (a fraud so clever that it fools the bank).

He makes a single phone call to report the invalid transaction. In all cases I've ever known that's all he has to do, and the transaction is eventually cancelled.

Well if that happens you're a victim of defamation not fraud. Does it happen often?

Go to the police complaints committee (or whatever they're called). Or your MP. Let them laugh at you.

I get the impression that card users seem to have very little protection. Once a company has your card details, it seems that they are able to carry out transactions without your further authorisation.

In 2005 I was with Bulldog Communications when they were taken over by C&W. The service was so bad that I stopped payments on my credit card (I was eventually able to do that). But, Bulldog/C&W also had my debit card details and took 3 payments from my account within one month. When I saw this on my statement, I emailed them asking an explanation. Without contacting me, they re-credited two of the payments.

I took this up with my bank, concerned that Bulldog/C&W were able to take money from my bank account and then put money back into it - all without my knowledge or authorisation. It seems that they were able to do this and no fraud had been committed. The only thing I was able to do was then instruct my bank that no further transactions would be permitted from Bulldog/C&W without my specific permission.

I just could not believe that this could could be done so freely without my permission or knowledge. I shortly afterwards left Bulldog anyway.

Iain

Can you explain what the purpose of that stupid comment was? Is it related to your protestations that when somebody has money taken from their account unauthorised they are not a victim?

Has it ever happened to you? You don't remember having to sign a form saying that certain transactions were not carried out by you? Maybe there's other things you have to do as well.

Defamation isn't caused by somebody acting as if you are a criminal unless they are would never do the same act for a non-criminal.

I am hoping that he meant that neither the committee nor an MP would laugh at you if you had a genuine grievance

Yes, that was a concern of mine in a recent thread. I had discovered that the online purchase of car insurance from Churchill was concealing the imposition of a CCA on the card I was intending to use.

I once tried to query something similar. I asked my bank exactly what access to my funds a merchant could obtain just from the possession of my card details. I found them unreasonably reticent about this.

That also became my view. I have never then agreed to either a DD or a CCA and think it is worrying that a CCA may now even somehow be agreed to tacitly.

Do you have proof of this? If any company actually did this regularly they'd have their merchant facilities stopped (for the cynics it'd cost the banks far more to deal with chargebacks etc than they make out of transaction fees for those who don't notice incorrect debits). The likelyhood is that the company accepts cardholder-not-present transactions and is willing to take the risk that the occasional few will be made fraudulently. Unless the vast majority were kosher they'd soon have their card facilities terminated.

Way OTT - when it happened to me it was simply a case of reporting it over the phone and that was that. You could try asking for compensation for your time and expense once the whole matter is settled.

There probably isn't a mechanism to selectively reject charges from a particular retailer to a particular card.

You keep going on about the "fraudulent company", what proof do you have that the company is fraudulent? They are more likely to be victims of the fraud themselves where a fraudster is using other peoples' card details to order products/services from them.

You're a victim of your bank's bureaucratic process for reporting unauthorised transactions. As that's all you know it is, at the moment.

DD is a separate issue, there you have authorised something and want to cancel your authority. Here someone appears to be claiming you authorised a transaction when you didn't.

There's a incorrect charge on the account. That's all you know. You know nothing else, not why, not that it even was a fraud (rather than a mistake), and no evidence as to where the problem occurred. The correct procedure is to report it to the bank, let them investigate, establish if it was actually fraud, and if so they can provide the evidence to the police if they or the retailer (who has been defrauded) want to pursue. The only reason for even considering going to the police would be if the bank refuse to refund the charge, and even that would be pretty pointless because the first port of call should be the financial ombudsman and if they rule against you it's unlikely the police would consider there is any evidence to pursue a criminal charge.

If you get an incorrect item on your bill in a restaurant do you call the police immediately, or do you query the charge with the waiter first?

This isn't a murder. The retailer and bank are still "alive". In general where the victim survives it is up to the victim (or someone on behalf of the victim) to report the crime, and if the victim wants to drop charges that's up to them (I know there are some exceptions).

But the police would want evidence that it is a fraud. The customer will not be able to provide that evidence. The bank and/or the retailer are in a far better position to be able to provide that evidence.

JB did not suggest a murder had been committed. He illustrated the absurdity of what you said by pointing out that if it were the case [that the victim of a crime is the only person permitted to report a crime to the police] then nobody could report murders.

That's utter tosh. Where a crime has been committed, *ANYONE* can *AND SHOULD* report it, since it is obviously in everyone's interests that crime should be fought.

In general it is not up to the victim to decide whether charges should or should not be dropped. It's different in civil mattersm of course, where no crime has been committed but there is still a victim. There it is only the victim or their agent who can raise proceedings.

OK, they'll want evidence that it was a crime. It doesn't have to be fraud. It could be plain old theft. It could be criminal negligence on the part of the bank to fail to assist the victim properly.

That's as may be. However, where an unauthorised charge has been made and, despite efforts to have what could have been a mistake corrected, nothing happens, that's pretty good prima facie evidence of a crime.

Wrong. You also know there has been a victim: You.

Even if there was no crime, there was a victim. You can be the victim of a mistake too, you know.

Agreed, that is the correct initial procedure.

Fine.

Going to the FOS or the courts to pursue a civil claim is one thing, it may get you your money back, and compensation on top. But if there is reason to suspect a crime has been committed, you should *also* involve the police, and as soon as possible.

Depends. Normally you would assume it was a simple mistake and you'd query it with the waiter. But suppose you had heard from friends of a number of unrelated incidents in all of which this particular waiter made the same "mistake", and when queried always "checks" and "discovers" that he's made a mistake and cancels the charge, apologising profusely. You decided to mount a sting operation to confirm his MO, and you catch him out. You call the police immediately. Or better still, make sure one of your dining partners *is* the police.

I didn't say it was only up to the victim to report *any* crime. I specifically mentioned fraud. There might be circumstances even in fraud cases where someone who's not the victim reports it - but in general it wouldn't be someone who can't even be sure there has even been a fraud.

So if someone gives you a lift and they drive at 31 in a 30 zone, I hope you'll report that crime immediately. Or if someone at works photocopies a copyrighted map.

But anyway the issue is evidence - without the evidence of the victim the crime will often be hard to prove. Going to the police with a copy of your credit card statement as the only evidence for "fraud" and they'll rightly laugh at you.

But in reality the authorities will be reluctant to press charges if the victim doesn't want them to. I (along with several other people) witnessed someone getting assualted and the police were called, but the charges were dropped because the victim didn't want charges pressed, despite the evidence being very good (lots of witnesses).

So can you give me some examples of such criminal charges being pursued having been instigated by the customer, rather than the bank, retailer or financial authorities?

So you'll be able to provide examples of such criminal charges being brought then.

The issue was about reporting it to the police. Do you go to the police and says "I've been a victim of a mistake"??

Which is pointless without the co-operation of the bank/retailer/VISA etc. You may as well leave it to them.

And your evidence on its own would prove nothing. You might have searched restaurant reviews on Google and found 10 other people complaining of the same thing, but when the restaurant is confronted they say that waiter had served 5000 people in that period and 4990 hadn't had a problem - and further investigation might show that waiter had undercharged 10 people over the same period.

In that case the direct victim is still the cardholder, because he's the one lumbered with either the loss of money (if he fails to notice [actually this is a bit like the tree falling in the forest where there is no-one to hear it - does it make a noise? If you don't notice you've lost money, are you a victim? :-) but I digress] or if, having noticed, he decides against taking any action because he can't face the hassle for such a small amount) or with the hassle involved in getting it back (which as you variously say can be hard to sort out or could take just one phone call).

If he then does manage to get the loss transferred to the retailer, then the retailer is the indirect victim. Remember that the retailer's victim status is conditional on the cardholder taking action, whereas the cardholder's victim status is unconditional.

Only if the bank calls you a criminal. Treating you as one isn't, they're just being cautious, after all you *could* be a criminal, you could have made the purchase in question and then tried to weasel out of paying for it by denying all knowledge of it.

But whether or not defamation/libel is involved, doesn't stop it being fraud, at least potentially.

I shouldn't think defamation of customers by their banks happens often. But in a way, any attempt by them to fob you off can, if successful, leave you the victim of fraud. That makes the accomplices after the fact. I understand it happens very often.

Yet in the case under discussion, it was not just a single charge. An incorrect (apparently periodic) charge was made, the bank notified and the charge reversed but then the same incorrect charge was accepted for the following periods despite the bank a) being informed that the charge was incorrect and that the entity making the charge does not have the account holder's authority to make it and b) instructed to decline any further attempts to apply that charge. Surely, at the very least this is negligence on the part of the bank and at worse (if the charge is actually fraudulent) making the bank an accessory to the fraud.

Was it? That wasn't clear from the OP's post, that charges were applied

There probably isn't a mechanism to put a block on a specific customer account to a specific retailer.

When I see one prosecuted for this kind of thing I'll believe you.