Very few things have happened to me fraudwise in my adult life. I'm pretty lucky considering I've probably made a purchase a week or more online since about 1996. Just to feed my 3 collections alone I've probably made 300 online purchases. I was an early adopter of this here Internet thing and I've never come close to slowing down when it comes to buying things online. I wouldn't be surprised if I made two a week this year or more when you factor in Christmas. I shop IN my underwear FOR underwear my friends.
Let me see if I can recall the things done against me. In 1996 when we bought our first house - during the first week while we were moving in, somebody called about 10 sports betting lines. My first phone bill came with over $300 worth of sports hotline calls. I got out of that very easily since I had my own phone line since 1987 and never once placed such a call. They think very brave people who know houses have just sold roll right up to the box on the side of the house, plug a phone in from there into the box and make the calls. Thank God it wasn't to a sex line, but maybe since the box is right by a flower bed and it was summer the flowers would have germinated faster. I don't even know if that's scientifically correct but it sounded funny to me so I'll stay with it.
>One time when going over my phone bill, I noticed a charge at the bottom for like $1.76 that didn't make any sense (well...it made less sense than the 10 legal charges) to me. I looked up the company online for the acronym that was given and it seemed extremely bogus. I called the phone company and they said it was there for 3 months and wouldn't go away unless I called. The company claimed I checked a box somewhere on a website to add their service but the phone company received about 100,000 calls in this area attributed to the fraud.
>Around 2001 or 2002 I started selling on Ebay and I got a flurry of emails about a truck I was selling. I got online and from my ID, I was selling a commercial 18 wheeler type cab for $27,000 and it was worth about $150,000. A guy bought the truck off of me (lol) for the buy it now price and now he was pissed off that he wasn't getting it. I know he was in on some kind of scam so I called Ebay and they took the sale down and acted like it never happened and closed his account down. They think he was going to try to convince me that he paid the $27k and to wipe the sale off my account I was going to pay him his money back. Ummmmm, hey junior, I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday. Maybe you want to set your sites a little lower....like $270. People might fall for that. What an assclown he was to talk to. He tried to intimidate me but he obviously didn't know what he was dealing with. I have an MBA in asshole and I'm not afraid to use it.
>Well tonight, I got an email from AMEX around 4:30 stating they had a security fraud alert on one of our 2 cards. I didn't even open the email. I deleted it and will continue to do so when I see a subject like that. Around 6 pm the phone rang and it was AMEX. Hmmmmm, I better pick this up. Yes, I screen. If you call me, I won't pick you up either. I'll pick up Still A Dad and Dog and precious few others. Dog and I communicate 99.9% of the time via email anyway. They asked if we had both cards in our possession. I got Mrs. Fan on her cell as her and Stroke were off getting their hair cut. We have both cards. Did Mrs. Fan make a $47 purchase online at USPS or download a song on iTunes today around 4:00 PM? Um, no. I was told I could hangup on Mrs. Fan that we were done with her. Click. He He He. That felt good!
>So she proceeded to tell me not to use that card that they actually shut it down around 4:30 anyway. A new one will be coming out. Comb my next bill for anything suspicious (Maaaaaaaan, we ain't found sheeeeeeit). Do I have any more questions? Are you kidding me? I'm in software QA. I used to wonder if I could trick the Ebay algorithm and have a friend bid stuff up. People get into fights all the time on Conquest Club (online Risk) about 2 players in a 4 person game being the same person. One of the moderators fulltime interogates ISPs and locations for people doing just that. They boot you if caught. I left years ago because of that. And RISK is NOT just for geeks. Huh Huh. The only thing she would tell me is that it was from Virginia.
>So I start guessing....and since it's usually my card online, the fact that it was my wife's card and out of state you flagged it. Maybe. We can't say anything because our methods cannot be made public. Since we have both cards, the person just guessed? Silence. We really don't talk about our methods other than to tell you it happened in Virginia. Did they spend less than $50 thinking they wouldn't be flagged? Do you put 10 suspicious ones together and then call one at random? How? How? How do you do it? I must know!!! I live for stuff like this! I'm sorry sir, can I help you with anything else? Is it because she made another charge today from our zip code? Is it because she maybe hasn't made a purchase for a few days before this happened? Why? Can you tell me?
>No. (Rats)
3 comments:
I've been shopping online ever since I got my first computer. I buy just about everything but groceries that way.
I've only gotten snagged with credit card trouble once... Two charges totaling about $1000 turned up on my bill. Someone bought some African masks using my card number. (there was no imprint, the numbers were written on the slip.)
Visa was pretty good about investigating it... I just had to provide a signature sample and attest that the purchase wasn't mine. Luckily they believed I wasn't heavy into African masks.
I never figured out how someone got my number, because I was never without my card and there's only one. Best I could guess, someone found a charge slip (or carbon) from a wine purchase I made at a liquor store near where the mask shop was.
We got hit last year for about 3-4 stupid little charges on our debit card. Now, if I had access to someone else's card number, I might be buying electronics, etc., but not this person...they bought me a custom-made Tshirt (and shipped it to my house), a membership to AARP, and something else that was only a few bucks. Never did figure it out. The credit union was great, but did require us to file a police report since the merchandise was shipped to us. I've replaced all my cards at least 3-4 times in the last few years as the numbers were "compromised" by retailers and the likes. But in relation to the volume of online shopping we do, the risk has been minimal.
LLBean put an alert on my visa a few weeks ago. It's the card I use for business purchases, and I paid an overseas (new zealand) vendor on the card for a few hundred dollars worth of consulting. The vendor's website had trouble accepting the card #, and I had to try to put the transaction through at least three times before it took it. That was enough to cause suspicion. They did call the house within a few hours, and they also had an alert tagged when I accessed the account online...and I was able to clear the alert online by verifying the transaction.
Their secret: Columbo, sitting in a cubicle somewhere in his raincoat figuring all this out.
"Uh, sir, I hate to bother you, but just one last question..."
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