I'm trying to buy replacement tires online earlier today, and my CC kept getting denied. I'm never denied?! anyway, I check my voice mail and sure enough there's a call from Visa's Fraud Dept. I call them up and apparently someone had tried to charge some $700+ to hpdirect and another couple hundred to partsolver.com!!

well, atleast they caught it in time. kudos to their Fraud Dept. but now I have to wait another week for a replacement card, and I'm f*cking wondering which site got hacked and had their CCs stolen? or maybe it was from some regular business? I dunno, but it has me a bit worried, and I feel like turtle-ing up my personal information (CC#s, SSN, etc.). I hope they don't have my SSN too-- identity theft sounds like a heap of no-fun.

I've heard about people contacting some gov't organization to put red flags up for any lines of credit being attempted to opened in my name, and other things. has anybody here ever done this? any other advice? having someone try to charge close to $1000 in my name really pisses me off.

 

Sorry to hear that...hope you get everything resolved. I hope I never have to face that situation....

 

I think you should contact the 3 big credit agencies. Hmm..can't remember their names.

Experian, Trans Union & Equifax?? Not sure. ..........................

Found them:

* Experian (formerly TRW)
www.experian.com
800-682-7654
P.O. Box 8030
Layton, UT 84041

* Trans Union Corp.
www.tuc.com
800-888-4213
P.O. Box 390
Springfield, PA 19064

* Equifax
www.equifax.com
800-685-1111
P.O. Box 105873
Atlanta, GA 30348

If it is your 'identity' that got stolen, it will be a PITA. That happened to my boss a few years ago & he had a 2-year headache. The perps opened up 5 or so new credit cards in his name, but with a different address, & kept getting new cards over & over again.

If it was just your CC, it may not be too bad.

Bad deal.

 

BTW - I use a different card & account for online shopping - with a lower limit. That way I can cancel it w/o affecting my 'main' card & they can't steal as much stuff.

 

That's precisely what I do too, thought I was the only one.

 

damn, i'm sorry to hear that bro.. mad props to Visa for catching it before it went to far though !!!

 

That sucks bro... I had the same thing happen to me when my wallet was stolen. Luckily I notified my credit card companies early enough to prevent any damage and got replacement cards with new numbers. To all who do online shopping, never ever and I mean never save your credit card information anywhere. Too many lowly hackers out there... If you can get a one-time use number for purchasing online, that's even better.

 

99.99% of the time it is not a site that got hacked to get your credit card information. What happens most of the time is 2 things.
1. You went out to eat and had you Credit card skimmed by your server when they left the table with your card.
2. Your credit card number happened to be generated by a credit card number generator that the thieves downloaded from the web.

And i give no Props to Visa or any other Credit card company out there, they do not really care about credit card Fraud. It is the vendors that lose the product and or money when it is stolen not Visa or AMEX or any other credit card company. The only reason VISA probley stopped the transaction is the Fraud service at hpDirect talked to them.

How do i know all of this?

I work as a Fraud Specialist for the largest e-commerence site in the world. Protecting over 35,000 different companies.

DigitalRiver.com
DigiBuy.com
RegSoft.com
RegNow.com
RegNet.com

IF you download software off the internet most likely it will come thru us.

 

you guys might not have noticed it but a lot of receipts have your full credit card number, name, and expiration date.

 

Basically it is impossible to avoid credit card fraud. Is just like a car accident, you don't know when is your turn. All they need is the numbers in front of your card. Or like NTB said the server will skim your card with their own little device, the device will upload the second set of 16 numbers from the magnetic strip back of your card. They will make a fake credit card, download your credit card info into their own. On their card they can make it whatever name they want, the receipt will print out the fake name that match their fake Driver lD. if they have only the first set number (front credit card) and a fake ID, the cashier will try to swipe your card, but it will read out blanks or won't do anything, and the cashier will just input the numbers by hand.

Sometimes the credit card company cannot do anything to stop hackers to hack into their systems.

How do I know all of this?

I live in Miami we all know