Image CC-BY, Robert Scoble
Have you ever been a victim of credit card fraud? Meet yours truly! Achievement unlocked! As a hacker I'm more careful when shopping online compared to ordinary people and still my card was misused.
What happened?
Right after opening business hours I was awaken by a phone call from my bank. They alerted me about a 6$ payment for a hotel reservation, which obviously I didn't make. The payment in question was made yesterday, April 25th. Ten minutes later I got another call telling me about more transactions, some successful ones. One in particular - a train ticket for nearly 250 EUR. My card was blocked immediately! The nice thing is that the bank clerk agreed to express issue a new card. Not without some help from my internal connections at the central office I got my fresh card before closing hours this evening. The ink on the paper slip was still wet, literary.
What will happen next is that they will charge me the successful transactions (not big amount) and later I have to file a claim for refund. That will take around a week I suppose. I've filed such claims before and things usually work well for the customer (the case was incorrect merchant though).
How did this happen?
Honestly I have no idea and will probably never find out. But as I said I take precautions:
- I have additional account with small amount in it just for online shopping to minimize risk;
- I use strong passwords with above average length of symbols (no I'm not going to tell you how much);
- I enter my card number ONLY over trusted SSL connections;
- I avoid smaller merchants and tend to shop from one or two places only;
- If I remember correctly I've never purchased anything online where the card verification code and additional information like expiration date and billing address is not required. If I did, I've been drunk then.
- I monitor all my accounts activity as well.
In addition the card in question was mostly used for cloud service subscriptions like Amazon Web Services and Google Apps. I have used it a few times for other things like plane tickets or travel reservations but nothing fishy.
The same card I've used rarely at physical ATM or POS terminal (once a year probably).
What's your story?
I'd like to use this unfortunate event to raise the topic and awareness among my readers. I wish you never experience this. Forget the money side of things, it's a pain in the ass to deal with this.
If you happen to on the victim side please share your story. Have things worked in your favor or not?
The picture above shows a new credit card concept. Per the author:
Kudelski and Mastercard are showing me the credit card of the future. This model can generate a new passcode on the fly, so if your card's number gets copied it won't be able to generate the right passcode.
If you have more insight on the credit card industry please share with us!
Comments !