topic Re: Fraud again in Credit Cards

Fraud again

Jnbmom — Sat, 17 May 2025 22:26:35 GMT

God darn it here we go again . Dh's JCP Mastercard hacked 5 charges Applebees, chipotle and wing stop . Grrrrrrr Funny trying to see these fraudulent charges but his JCP account disappeared from online account is this normal ??

Anyhiw called they will report this fraud and send another card . This is getting ridiculous

Re: Fraud again

KatzNDawgs — Tue, 20 May 2025 02:36:40 GMT

Can you use virtual card #s to reduce fraud? I also hated having to get a new card/# yearly from fraud issues. Virtual #s have helped bring that down a lot.

Re: Fraud again

crystal626 — Tue, 20 May 2025 04:20:55 GMT

@KatzNDawgs wrote:
Can you use virtual card #s to reduce fraud? I also hated having to get a new card/# yearly from fraud issues. Virtual #s have helped bring that down a lot.

There are very few cards that support them.

Re: Fraud again

GreatLife — Tue, 20 May 2025 17:06:05 GMT

Odd the merchants are all eateries. How many times has this happened?

Re: Fraud again

dfwxjer — Tue, 20 May 2025 17:32:53 GMT

@Jnbmom wrote:
God darn it here we go again . Dh's JCP Mastercard hacked 5 charges Applebees, chipotle and wing stop . Grrrrrrr Funny trying to see these fraudulent charges but his JCP account disappeared from online account is this normal ??

Anyhiw called they will report this fraud and send another card . This is getting ridiculous

Are these all local eateries?

This is certainly atypical fraudster behavior... any chance Dh is making these charges and trying to cover them up?

Re: Fraud again

Jnbmom — Tue, 20 May 2025 17:50:30 GMT

No DH isn't making charges I have all the cards safe and put away and this card hasn't been used in ar least 6 months .

Wingstop isn't even remotely near us .

Re: Fraud again

Drifter73 — Tue, 20 May 2025 18:10:05 GMT

The most common access points to my cards resulting in fraud were tracked back to:

1. A waiter in a small town took my card out of my sight to pay my bill and 3 weeks later ordered hundreds of dollars from Walgreens online to be shipped to their home address.

2. A Wendy's drive thru employee stepped away from the windows with one of my cards and a few days later bought over $1k on Amazon with it, again, shipped it to their home address.

The home addresses is what got them both caught. The smarter ones use po boxs with fake id and dummy accounts on the shopping sites.

These days, i never let my card out of my sight. I insist on paying at the register myself or I open my car door at the drive thru and step out so I can see them better and they know I'm watching.

So far, so good.

I keep a dedicated set of cards for online purchases separately so its easier to monitor.

Re: Fraud again

dfwxjer — Tue, 20 May 2025 18:41:40 GMT

@Drifter73 wrote:
The most common access points to my cards resulting in fraud were tracked back to:

1. A waiter in a small town took my card out of my sight to pay my bill and 3 weeks later ordered hundreds of dollars from Walgreens online to be shipped to their home address.

2. A Wendy's drive thru employee stepped away from the windows with one of my cards and a few days later bought over $1k on Amazon with it, again, shipped it to their home address.

The home addresses is what got them both caught. The smarter ones use po boxs with fake id and dummy accounts on the shopping sites.

These days, i never let my card out of my sight. I insist on paying at the register myself or I open my car door at the drive thru and step out so I can see them better and they know I'm watching.

So far, so good.

I keep a dedicated set of cards for online purchases separately so its easier to monitor.

That's absolutely wild to me. I use my cards all over the world and I've never had to deal with this, but I exclusively use credit cards so in the rare event of fraud I'm not liable for it. Absolute worst case scenario I just chop up a card if it experiences a fraud event, and use another card until the replacement arrives.

How are the fraudsters in these specific situations able to bypass AVS and all the other fraud filters that merchants use? Most of the time a merchant will require your home address to be entered in the billing information at the bare minimum.

Re: Fraud again

smcj — Tue, 20 May 2025 21:12:27 GMT

@GreatLife wrote:
Odd the merchants are all eateries. How many times has this happened?

Years ago (2007) I had an AMEX fall to fraud after using it at a Wendy's in Columbus, GA. The pattern was identical -- until it wasn't. Small/minor eateries first. Then a movie theater and a restaurant (cough, dinner and a movie, anyone)? They didn't "go big" until literally right after I had AMEX shut the card down -- which, at the time, I had to fight AMEX to do because they wanted to wait until the first questioned charges went from pending to cleared. My pushing AMEX to lock it down kept the fraudster from walking out of Walmart with what appeared to be a flatsceen TV -- which cost a lot more back then.

Anyway, point being, it looked to my eye like the smaller charges were "hmm let's see what I can do" probes, during which time the fraudster was building up confidence to go bigger. I also had cards, similar timeframe, that got compromised in unknown ways -- probably just number generation, at that point, it predated the use of chip-in-card going big in the USA -- where there were small fraudulent "probe" charges, followed only later by bigger attempts.

So yeah, it may look weird, but it's not unheard of, and there is a methodology to it.

Re: Fraud again

Dcowboy08 — Tue, 20 May 2025 19:29:44 GMT

I use RFID blocking cards in my wallet and other items to prevent scanning my cards.

Re: Fraud again

coldfusion — Tue, 20 May 2025 19:49:11 GMT

@Dcowboy08 wrote:
I use RFID blocking cards in my wallet and other items to prevent scanning my cards.

Even without RFID blocking that type of risk is pretty much just a red herring, starting with the range of these cards is only a couple of inches.

The bigger risk comes from senarios like card skimmers or in restaurants where a server takes your card from you to a different area out of your sight to process the payment and then taking quick pics of the card's front and back with a cell phone camera before they walk back to hand your card back.

Re: Fraud again

Jnbmom — Tue, 20 May 2025 20:09:26 GMT

I just don't get haven't used the card at all and now 5 charges for restaurants in a 2 day span that the creditor wouldn't elaborate on at all .

Re: Fraud again

smcj — Tue, 20 May 2025 21:11:10 GMT

@Jnbmom wrote:
I just don't get haven't used the card at all and now 5 charges for restaurants in a 2 day span that the creditor wouldn't elaborate on at all .

If the card was fraudulently used *and then* disappeared from the online account portal *without you reporting the fraud first* it reeks of a fraud situation the issuer came to know about independently. For all anyone knows in that context, it could have been a batch of cards, or a generic data breach, or or or or, rather than [just] your individual card. For my part, I'd bank (no pun intended) on your card having been unfortunately one of many in some kind of batch event. And in such event I'd expect them to tell you absolutely squat (Corporate Liability Management 101-style tactical).

I found it interesting that when my AMEX was compromised as I described, all the places where it was used/attempted to be used were 200 miles away not only from the Wendy's, but from where I was physically holding my own card in-hand. That pointed to someone scanning at the Wendy's, but the card details being provided to someone in another city, who in turn put it on a physical card in short order and then either used it themselves or sold it to someone else who went walking around swiping in that 200-miles-away specific locality. Oddly educational, that whole situation.

Re: Fraud again

crystal626 — Tue, 20 May 2025 23:56:24 GMT

@coldfusion wrote:
@Dcowboy08 wrote:
I use RFID blocking cards in my wallet and other items to prevent scanning my cards.
Even without RFID blocking that type of risk is pretty much just a red herring, starting with the range of these cards is only a couple of inches.

The bigger risk comes from senarios like card skimmers or in restaurants where a server takes your card from you to a different area out of your sight to process the payment and then taking quick pics of the card's front and back with a cell phone camera before they walk back to hand your card back.

Not just the distance but contrary to popular belief, these chips are microprocessors aka mini computers, that can't just be cloned remotely. They encrypt the data and many of them use one time transaction codes that simply can't be duplicated. It would be major news, and break the entire banking system, if this security was able to be breached easily.

Re: Fraud again

xenon3030 — Thu, 22 May 2025 02:39:31 GMT

Does it get managed by Synchrony or JCP? Either of them possibly suck (or both ).

Re: Fraud again

KatzNDawgs — Thu, 22 May 2025 03:10:26 GMT

@crystal626 wrote:
@KatzNDawgs wrote:
Can you use virtual card #s to reduce fraud? I also hated having to get a new card/# yearly from fraud issues. Virtual #s have helped bring that down a lot.
There are very few cards that support them.

Often it isn't necessarily card specific, but if you load your card into a mobile pay service like google wallet and pay using that, they can assign a virtual card # to the transaction so it can't be stolen and reused.