Beware!! Theft Online is More Real

[Justin Kirchhoff]

I got a call from my credit card company today asking about some charges.

Turns out someone hijacked my credit card numbers and bought $82,000 worth of stuff!

This is ridiculous because my credit line was nowhere close to that number in the first place. My bank didn't catch it until 4 days later....dumbasses.

Anyways, long story short, watch buying stuff online guys. Try calling and making orders over the phone.

Time to rebuke the charges!

 

[David M]

I got a call from my credit card company today asking about some charges.

Turns out someone hijacked my credit card numbers and bought $82,000 worth of stuff!

This is ridiculous because my credit line was nowhere close to that number in the first place. My bank didn't catch it until 4 days later....dumbasses.

Anyways, long story short, watch buying stuff online guys. Try calling and making orders over the phone.

Time to rebuke the charges!

If necessary and at all possible, only ever FAX orders containing your credit card number. Not foolproof, but surprisingly hard to intercept. Another trick is to make up a small graphic in Photoshop (or even PC paint) of your financial details and include that in the email as an image instead of typing it in directly. Much harder for automated data sniffing programs to read.
(Also good for stopping automated data miners from picking up your email address and spamming you

 

[Jeremy Hughes]

$82,000. What exactly did they try to buy?

 

[Jorge Díaz-Amador]

Justin,

Get ready for a fight. With these people you are guilty until proven innocent. They will act all nice and cooperative in the beginning, but when you have forgotten about this, and moved on, they will try to bring the charges back. Their system is to make more work for you and wear you down. I'd cancel the account altogether because they obviously have very bad security.

The most secure way to buy online is to stick with large reputable vendors with non-buggy websites, and use PayPal with everyone else. Also PayPal can generate "virtual" credit card numbers that are good for one use only. If you have to make a payment on a website you don't totally trust, then use the virtual account number.

NEVER e-mail credit card numbers via e-mail.

 

[Henk van den Doel]

Yep, had some fraud here on an online transaction as well. Like cinematechnic said: all is good in the beginning. But then all of a sudden they maybe manage to find a little line in their terms that can make them say it was still your own fault. That cost me 1000 dollars once.. so do really be careful on this. Not trying to scare you, but be on top of it and talk to the right people within the creditcard company from the start (and get things written down for you). Hope it works out for you.

 

[CVB]

Some guys used my SSN to rack up $10K in cell phone charges.... I got the call from Sprint over 1 year later. It was a major pain in the butt to get it taken off my credit score and it took about 4 months for things to get back to normal. Got to watch out where your SSN goes, it can be used for almost any type of fraud.

 

[ericyoung]

SSN is Social Security Number?