[LuganoPirate]

Thanks everyone. Very useful. I’ll reply in a bit more detail in the morning. Been out all day and very tired.

[BusinessTraveller]

Hi LuganoPirate, sorry to hear about your experience. You might also like to read our feature on the subject:

http://www.businesstraveller.com/archive/2012/december-2012-january-2013/special-reports/stop-thief!

EDIT: Not sure why the link isn’t working – if you copy and paste, you will get through to the article. Thanks.

[LuganoPirate]

Lots of wisdom in this forum – thanks.

It’s not a UK card but is issued by a EU country. I prefer not to say which just now as I don’t want to prejudice my case, so I’ll stay a bit sketchy on details, but I will update you as we go along and let you know the outcome, with either praise – or not – for the issuer!

What this has done though, is make me go back to my preferred method of payment – good old cash – at least that can’t be cloned! It’s also amazing the discounts that can be had for cash, even when insisting on a receipt. I know you can’t use it for airline tickets or online shopping, but interestingly, both Swiss and KLM allow you pay them bank to bank by transfer within 24 hours of booking. I’d prefer this.

Of course, many card companies entice you with extra miles on your spend, promotions and the like to keep you paying with their card but I now question how worthwhile this is in light of my experience.

My bank did say they should reimburse me, confirming this again yesterday, and maybe I got a less than competent member of staff as she could not (apparently) even see the use of the card, only when the last payment was made.

I live on in hope!

[LuganoPirate]

Thanks BT, but the link does not work?

I think I may have read it as I’m a subscriber but in light of my experience would be nice to read again. I guess I’m just as guilty of the “cannot happen to me” syndrome!

[NameRemoved-18/12/14]

Hello LP

I can only empathise with your situation. In the past few years I have experienced credit card fraud at least twice, including a mysterious direct debit on a monthly basis. My bank was hopeless in dealing with it all, so I took matters into my own hand. I informed them that I had lost my card and was promptly issued with a new one, and ever since the direct debits have stopped.

I hope you get things sorted soon.

[TiredOldHack]

LP – I’m going to be a bit circumspect here, but a few years ago I was a white hat, and busting card fraud was all part of that.

In fact, I actually did something for dear old British Airways, but that’s definitely sub judice, as it were.

First thing is, it’s hard to discern from the postings whether this was a credit card or a debit card. It makes a difference. If it’s a debit card and your bank account has been raided, it’s your money that’s gone. If it’s a credit card, it’s their money, and that makes a big difference.

Sadly, PINs are easy to obtain, via a number of ways. Contrary to what a lot of people think, getting passwords and PINs is not generally down to breaking into people’s systems by devious electronic ways. The most effective way is good old ‘social engineering’ and then the tendency of people to be lax in their own security (using the same PW or PIN for more than one account, for example).

Card theft is so rife that the villains sell lists of valid cards on the darknet for prices as low as a buck a card, or less. Generally, most compromised cards will have been blocked by the time you try to use them, though.

I’ve had a credit card copied, in Colombia, actually, and it was used to run up bills on airline tickets, electronic goods and (oddly) porn. I mean, who pays for porn these days?. As these were ‘cardholder absent’ purchases, they used my passport number, which I’d put on a hotel register form, as proof of ID.

What I do these days, when giving my passport number, is change the last number. My number ends in 6, so I change it to a 7. Nobody ever checks. If I’m moving around a country, I change it to 8 at the next hotel, then 9 at the next, then 0, then 1, and so on. Should it ever happen again (and it hasn’t), it means that it’s easy to pinpoint which hotel had the bent staff member who copied the card details.

If you want a bit more help/advice, feel free to take it to email. In the meantime, I’d be interested to know if, prior to this fraud breaking, you’d used the card in any of the following places:

Amsterdam, Malaga, Toronto, London, Jo’burg

[MartynSinclair]

ToH – interested in hearing how you “change” your passport number… at hotels. What happens if you are asked by reception for your passport so they can make a copy…..?

[TiredOldHack]

Obviously, it doesn’t work in that instance.

[Papillion53]

I’m sorry LP that you’re having these issues and hope you get it all sorted out ASAP. 🙂

TOH – I really don’t like it when you have to give hotels your passport to copy – what do they do with this piece of paper when you’ve left the hotel – I’m sure the “good” hotels destroy it responsibly, but do others just throw your details in the bin? After all we are constantly told to not dispose of sensitive information in our bins, so how do we know what happens?

I am amazed at how easily it is for people that you would never really think about to get a lot of personal information about you .. E.g. At the spa, you fill in a form, name, address, DOB, GP info, medical etc etc., and then often on a card which you complete. I never, ever put my correct DOB and never my full address – paranoid maybe, but having heard horror stories of identity fraud, you just never know! And who would suspect filling in a form to have a lovely massage to be a potential source of this?

I have finally got the DH trained to do this also. 😉

I like your suggestion of changing numbers, I do this sometimes with other stuff especially if someone asks for a credit card over the phone as a deposit and I just know they are writing all the details down on that “piece of paper” to land up goodness knows where! If I have to pay with a credit card over the phone, I always ask them to send me the receipt.

We recently had a block on one of our credit cards and when we checked – this was on a local transaction after having just returned from the US and used this card in deepest outpost Alaska. However, as it turned out what happened was when I paid something over the phone just as we had returned home, they entered the wrong expiry date and so that rang an alarm somewhere in the CC fraud office. But we had to phone up and it took some time to get to the bottom as to why our cards and been blocked.

We never (or rarely) use a debit card, used to be only at Costco, but they now take Amex! 🙂

[LuganoPirate]

Thanks ToH. It was a credit card, but they take the amount automatically from my account each month.

It didn’t happen in any of those cities, but it was in S. Africa. Not sure where yet but as I hardly use the card it should pinpoint the place it happened fairly quickly.

I’m very careful, almost to the point of paranoia. I ask the machine to be bought to me, or if they can’t I go to the cash desk to put it in. I also shilled the keypad.

If drawing cash, which is extremely rare with a cc, only in an emergency, then I only use a machine inside a bank and still take all the precautions, including checking there are no false pads etc inserted. Once in Cape Town at the market I wanted to buy some colonial figures. I needed cash and the stall holder “kindly” took me to the cash machine. I thanked him for his help, told him I’d come back and went elsewhere to draw the cash. Maybe he was being helpful but I took no chances.

Like you I never put in my correct passport number, I usually make one up. I also refuse them permission to make a copy, though in Italy they insist on writing down the details themselves on a form, so I can’t get round that.

Thanks for the offer of advice. It’s early days so I’ll wait a moment to see what Visa says, but I may come back to you if I may.

[LuganoPirate]

Papillion,like you I always wonder why everyone wants my date of birth for everything? I now have an alter ego, with my own DoB and address for instances as you mention. I still use x.x.1900 making me 113 years old and most all sites accept this!

For hotel bookings I now use exclusively Booking.com (unless it’s a chain such as Hilton etc) for two reasons.

1. Sometimes you can book without a credit card and just settle with the hotel directly on arrival.

2. Where a card is needed, they keep the card details, never passing it to the hotel. You then settle direct on arrival. Only if you don’t arrive, or if pre-payment is needed, they take the money and pass it to the hotel. This makes me feel much happier as I have more confidence in Booking.com than some of the hotels I’ve never heard of or been to before.

In a small hotel where I may stay just one night, I usually pay cash. I can often get a discount of the CC fee (and sometimes more) as well if I do this, and yes, i do ask!

It would be helpful, and help combat fraud, if CC statements were available on line. Some do, many don’t. HSBC is great with this as you can check your running total anytime.

I’d also like to be able to change my PIN outside of the card issuers home country, so that once a month, I can change the PIN, thus if anyone did get it they could use the card maximum one month to its limit assuming it’s not blocked for suspicious activity.

I’ve done this also using the card at an establishment where I’m a little suspicious that the staff were a little too eager to help input the PIN. I’ve gone straight to a cash machine and changed it, but as I say, that’s limited to the card issuers home country. On that occasion just outside London after a stay at a top hotel – where later they also tried to rip me off on a doctors bill. Curiously a week after I got a security call but not sure if it was related or not.

[TiredOldHack]

LP – South Africa now figures quite prominently on the ‘fraud radar’. The Nigerians are still the unchallenged Number One, but there is a lot of internet/card fraud coming out of SA these days.

The thing to remember is that this is truly global. Gangs co-operate with other gangs in other countries, for a percentage.

[capetonianm]

Hold the bank responsible and don’t waver. It is up to them to prove that you were negligent. You should be able to prove where you were when the cash was drawn in WDH and by extension, that you weren’t in WDH at that time.

One of my Euro credit cards was cloned a few years ago, it later turned out at a Carrefour service station in France. Cash was drawn over a weekend in Madrid, larger sums than my daily allowance, the bank never explained to me how that could happen. I was in Barcelona that weekend and was able to prove that, and even though it would have been theoretically possible for me to have shuttled between Madrid and Barcelona, the bank accepted my statement and refunded the money.

Then a couple of years ago my UK credit card issuer called me to query some transactions made, asking me if I’d purchased air tickets on FlySAA.com recently. I had, but there were other transactions and it turned out that SAA had some Nigerian scammers working in their call centre ……. hello!!

More recently, my UK card issuer contacted me regarding what they thought was an out of pattern transaction, a regular payment to a phone company that I’d been making almost on the same date every month and for the same amount, but they suddenly flagged it as ‘out of pattern’. I told them it wasn’t but it took them 3 days to unblock my card.

It all seems a bit hit and miss.

[IanFromHKG]

Well, nobody’s picked up on this so far, so I’m sorry but I have to say that I think you were a bit careless, LP. If this happened over three months, and you didn’t pick up on it, then the card company may well refuse to reimburse you for the first two months’ worth of payments at least, and with some justification. This is particularly so if you normally don’t use the card much and the account activity was so unusual that the amounts disappearing from your bank account each month were significant and your statement suddenly started to average four pages a month…

I think all the advice you received here is sound, but the best advice is to check your statement each month

Incidentally, lest I sound holier than thou, I will confess to having made some howlers in my time, including going through a period where I kept losing my AmEx card (always in the top slot of my wallet, and it would sometimes fall out when taking it out of my pocket). Every time I did this I got a replacement within 24 hours, wherever I was in the world, and never had to pay for unauthorised purchases

My best story, however, which just goes to show how little people check these things… Back in 2003 I was with my family in Morocco when AmEx called me to check on my card, and did I have it with me? Yes, I replied, and they asked me to dig it out and check. Blow me…. For several days I had been using someone else’s card! Obviously another gentleman had used his card at about the same time as me in some establishment and we had each received each other’s card back. Neither of us noticed, and nor did any of the places we had each used the cards subsequently. Since the name on the card I then had was obviously Chinese, and I am very obviously not, clearly no-one looks at these details – or the signatures – very much. It was only discovered because he realised, and called AmEx, who called me. Oh, and yes, yet again I got a new card within 24 hours, in Marrakech!

[IanFromHKG]

Well, nobody’s picked up on this so far, so I’m sorry but I have to say that I think you were a bit careless, LP. If this happened over three months, and you didn’t pick up on it, then the card company may well refuse to reimburse you for the first two months’ worth of payments at least, and with some justification. This is particularly so if you normally don’t use the card much and the account activity was so unusual that the amounts disappearing from your bank account each month were significant and your statement suddenly started to average four pages a month…

I think all the advice you received here is sound, but the best advice is to check your statement each month

Incidentally, lest I sound holier than thou, I will confess to having made some howlers in my time, including going through a period where I kept losing my AmEx card (always in the top slot of my wallet, and it would sometimes fall out when taking it out of my pocket). Every time I did this I got a replacement within 24 hours, wherever I was in the world, and never had to pay for unauthorised purchases

My best story, however, which just goes to show how little people check these things… Back in 2003 I was with my family in Morocco when AmEx called me to check on my card, and did I have it with me? Yes, I replied, and they asked me to dig it out and check. Blow me…. For several days I had been using someone else’s card! Obviously another gentleman had used his card at about the same time as me in some establishment and we had each received each other’s card back. Neither of us noticed, and nor did any of the places we had each used the cards subsequently. Since the name on the card I then had was obviously Chinese, and I am very obviously not, clearly no-one looks at these details – or the signatures – very much. It was only discovered because he realised, and called AmEx, who called me. Oh, and yes, yet again I got a new card within 24 hours, in Marrakech!

[Author]

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