Beware!

Probably not the place to put this, but beware of your Credit Card getting cloned. I only use mine online for bike stuff and for booking ferries etc. Just got a whack of fraudulent debits on it. One for £1014!! I have phoned the necessary and it is being sorted now. Not a nice feeling though.

IN future I am going to keep a daily check on that account.

John

Worrying. I got caught up in the giant Busters fraud of a few years back where a rogue employee was involved. Loads of people from loads of bike forums all had their cards ripped off with purchases from Ebuyer. I had two £800 transactions from them. I was a bit annoyed at Ebuyer for shipping stuff to an address other than mine. When I want companies to send stuff to my work address it is a flipping nightmare getting them to do it yet when a fraudster does it they have no problem.

What really p*ssed me off was that I only found out what happened from bike forums. The card company and Busters knew where the fraud was but never told me. So I was left wondering how it happened: did I have a virus on my PC (I spent hours formatting and reinstalling to be sure) and also I blamed a company from where I had just bought a TV.

I'm insured out of my ****....bring it on!

Originally Posted by ASM-Forever

I'm insured out of my ****....bring it on!

So what? They refund it anyway. You are just paying extra..

Originally Posted by ejohnh

So what? They refund it anyway. You are just paying extra..

If you look in the T&C's there are usually loads of stipulations, to get them out of paying.

These might be using the card overseas(Africa? etc).

I'm covered for everything. I don't pay anything extra, its just a service with the card.

Some theiving scumbags cleared my account out today. The bank fraud dept knew about it before I did and refunded everything that went missing. Unfortunately they cancelled all my cards and I'm off on a business trip abroad next Tuesday.. Without credit cards or cash cards.

The bank knew exactly where my details were taken and I can't believe it happened. It was a major petrol station! How, I have no idea.

Looks like they'll catch them which is good news!

Carl

[embee]

I won't use cards in petrol stations now, cash or nothing.

It's been in the local press, so it's OK to say my local Shell garage has had a series of card fraud scams going on recently. The plod claim it's sorted, but I'll not chance it thanks.

The particular station never seems to have the same cashier two days running, and all are , how do I put it, "young, not of UK origin".

I went in there a few months ago, filled bike, about ?13, handed them a twenty. The cashier looked at it and said "Don't you have a card?"
"No" I said, "don't you want the cash? It's that or nothing". Grudgingly they took the cash.

All the reported fraud was ATM cash withdrawals in the far east or central Asia using magnetic info only apparently. Why can't card issuers give us the option of electing for chip only transactions? I'm sure it would cut down the ATM fraud. A lot of ATM's are still not chip readers as I understand it. Or can chip cards be fully cloned easily?

[tigersaw]

I've erased the mag strip on my credit card, not caused me any problems so far.

Spooky! it was a Shell station!

Originally Posted by embee

Why can't card issuers give us the option of electing for chip only transactions? I'm sure it would cut down the ATM fraud. A lot of ATM's are still not chip readers as I understand it. Or can chip cards be fully cloned easily?

The way the magnetic strip cloning works, is that they record (usually stored in audio format which can later be decoded) the information as the card is 'swiped'. They then need to be able to do the signature, but if they are making a new card with your information, they can put whatever signature they like on their card.

With a "chip & pin" card, you insert the card, the machine fires electrons through the chip, and reads the output. This is then (usually) sent down a cable to the cashier's till/machine. There are numerous devices, available quite cheaply, that will record a signal passing down a wire (for example, keyloggers that mount onto the cable coming from a keyboard). There's no need to decode the audio data from above in these cases, as it's already in the format they need. The chip used on the cards can be bought for as little as 0.2p per chip (if buying in bulk), then you only need someone to put it on a bit of plastic. The chip encoders can be bought for £50 and upwards each, and will encode as many chips as you like. Both the chips and encoding units have other legitimate purposes, so they're never likely to be outlawed.

With the "chip & pin" cloners, they also get your pin number, as you enter it into the device. Nice that isn't it?

Before someone mentions it, there's also wireless "chip & pin" devices. But then again, if you know the frequency, you can intercept the signal & then you just need to decode it. Doing this you can be up to 100ft away, or for example, outside in the car park. Decoding isn't that hard either.

Tesco have a good system, you hand your card over, and it's put into the till (where the older cards used to be swiped), and you enter the PIN into a seperate device. This removes possibility that a cashier can get your card details (so long as they don't have their own "belt swipe"), but it's still vulnerable to people higher up the food chain.

Most banks know (and have known for a long time) that the old signature method is more secure. Yet they're looking into things like "contact-less cards" where you don't even have to hand over your card. I don't think I'll have one of them thanks.

Anyone paranoid yet?