Posted on 04/01/2014 7:45:20 AM PDT by pabianice
In the last three days I have been contacted by credit card fraud offices regarding two different credit cards with questionable charges. Several months ago I was contacted about a third. All the charges quoted were fraudulent. In the past I have received such a call perhaps once every several years, but never two in one week or three in several months. They were legitimate calls and asked for no personal information and the fraud was backed-up by the cards' online webpages.
Is anyone else having such a problem? WTH?
I was told that PNC is just now getting around to dealing with all of the numbers that were compromised in the Target hacking.
Did you use the cards in question at Target in November/December 2013?
No.
I have had credit cards for almost as long as they have existed. I have a personal one, and one for my organization.
I have NEVER gotten a call like you are telling us about. NEVER!
Cancel any credit card that’s questionable and start new.
On December 19, 10 different payday loan companies loaned to people claiming to be my husband. It’s a mess. And we had not shopped at Target. The frauds are also claiming to be single, so the companies were not required to notify me. We’ve locked our credit reports, and set up alerts so that anytime anyone tries to pull a report, we’re notified.
well it certainly cant be your computer as we know there is no hoi polloi, password gathering programs or viruses on it, everyone uses an’Internet Security’ suite and an anti-keylogger virtual keyboard to tap in passwords.
So it really must be random and just as likely to strike the next fellow.
Couple years ago got an urgent email about credit cards and I recognized the USAA 800 number. Called the bank and the fraud guy asked, "Has your wife just bought gas in Worcester, Mass? Did she just buy $500 of liquor? Did she just spend $200 at Spencer Gifts?"
Turns out that her wallet was stolen from her office. They identified the fraudulent transactions within 6 hours.
Had my card compromised once. Just got a new one with CC Company and hey reversed he charges. Was a bit of a nuisance but nothing more. That was a couple years ago. Nothing of late.
It just sounds like your number is being passed around. While it is likely NOT this, have you run a recent malware scan just to make sure you don’t have a key logger or something?
Although it is a nuisance, it behooves us to get online once a week and check our CC accounts, I have been lax, but now have put a nag/reminder in the computer to do that. Just checked mine today while working on my taxes.
And before you travel, always call your CC company so they won’t decline something and force you to have to call them while on your trip.
We’ve had the occasional call from Barclays about possible fraudulent charges. Most have been a charge we’ve made at an odd location.
However, two, over last 4-5 years have been the real deal (one was a charge in Corsica!). Old card cancelled, new cards issued. Barclays seems to be good at catching that stuff...caught those before we were even aware of the charges. It’s a nuisance to deal with, but I thank them EVERY SINGLE TIME.
As another commenter has done, we’ve also frozen our credit thru the 3 major bureaus, with a repeat fraud alert included. ALL new credit in our names is denied, unless we unfreeze our accts. Cost nothing to do, and if you aren’t planning on much new credit, a good way to go.
Target was only one of many companies involved in the fraud. I forgot which others were also hit but Macys was one of many more.
Motels are a very common source of fraud. TV ads are really bad.
It is possible for you not to have a credit card and someone opens an account in your name.
Debit cards are worse because your personal bank account is hit.
Disregard “repeat” above.
You must have signed up for Ocare
Do you ever make online purchase? Might you have gotten a virus recently?
I do have anti-virus plus malwarebytes on my computer and run scans daily. One cc, I do check on the computer, but the other cc has never been accessed via the computer. Plus we have a few other cc's that we check, but they haven't been had problems.
Asked the cc rep that I spoke to about one of the fraud cc how this could happen. He told me that the people running these scams have gotten very sophisticated at building programs that just run numbers through and get lucky more often hitting the right combos now. People should be expecting more of this to happen to them and he recommended continually monitoring your acct to try to find the problem as soon as it happens. Still a hit/miss thing right now, but frustrating for sure.
Of course they cancelled and issued new cards and now I do check them daily.
It happened to me three times in the past year, twice on the same account (got a new number and then it was hit too). Each time I saw charges on the account’s website before anything was even shipped.
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