Fraud nowadays
    17 years
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Got a suspicious text from "Comenity Fraud." Said to reply yes or no to a charge, so I went into the app.
Sure enough, fraudulent charges are on the account.
Seeing as I don't use this card, and I have full possession of it, imho technology is used to hack somewhere. The only places I've used the account at all was for UPS 5 mos. ago, and XM 10 mos ago. That's it, 2 charges in a year.
The last time this happened was at an online bank that has my entire life's savings (to some of you that's a red flag). I mean they are FDIC insured, but on a debit card I've never activated, there were charges. Had full possession, never used at all. This is why I say the problem is not me, it's "them."
Seriously, as we age, how many of these fraudulent charges will we never catch? Everything is set to autopay. If I didn't get the text, I would have never even checked.
I was talking to one of our corp counsels last week, as we have a coffee klatch at which we let loose and joke around and forget about corp RTO life. He said, "I hate humanity." I said why? To which he said, "If you do my job for a week, you will too." Why? Is it all the frivilous lawsuits against us (the ********* union accused us of operating a criminal enterprise, talk about someone in a glass house throwing stones)? He said no, it's just the rampant outright fraud these days. And it's perpetrated by what we would consider just ordinary people.
looking daily
My primary defense against credit card fraud is that I have not very many accounts, and look at the most recent transactions daily. With luck I'll notice something out of line early enough to avoid a big pile up of trouble.
If daily seems too much to stomach, I think even weekly would be a significant defense.
personal GPS user since 1992
Have you ever used the card for online purchases?
I only have two credit cards, from the largest companies and they are very good about catching fraudlent charges (which have been quite rare). But one of them flagged some bogus charges last winter and after contacting them, they cancelled the card and sent me a new one with a different account number.
This could have only happened because some place where I used that card got hacked, I suspect it could have been AT&T because they had a big data breach shortly before then, but that's just a guess. Anyway, I started getting lots of spam e-mails and phone calls around the same time, so that just reinforces my theory that a company where I used the credit card online got hacked, revealing my credit card, e-mail and phone number.
Ugh. Get ready for a lot more of that in the years to come. IMO, the only defense is to use the major card companies that are vigilant about this stuff and are good about spotting transactions that don't fit your usual pattern.
To make it worse, I get a real flood of totally bogus phishing e-mails claiming my card was used for some fraudulent purchase, but they are just spam (and pretty obvious). I'm sure their idea is to send you to a bogus website for the credit card company where they can steal your account and password. Not seeing so many of those now, but that might be because my spam filter is catching them. Anyway, don't get sucked in by that scam.
boydsmaps.com
Still getting them...
Not seeing so many of those now, but that might be because my spam filter is catching them.
Yep, just looked in my spam folder, here's a snip from one of these scams last week that was automatically deleted by the spam filter:
______________
Apple Wallet invited you to Review the payment for $349.49 via MetaPay if this is an error reach us at 1 806 xxx xxxx.
Review the payment for $349.49 via MetaPay if this is an error reach us at 1 806 xxx xxxx. Wednesday 8 July 2026 at 20:00 IST We successfully completed the Payment of $231.66 Via Apple-Pay. If not done by you, call Meta assistance at 1 806 xxx xxxx.
[edit] LOL, here's an even better one from my spam folder.
______________
As you instructed 40.9326BTC was deposited into your wallet. Your information remains the same.
Page: xxxxx.Net
Customer ID: xxxxxxx
Access Code: xxxxxxxx
Have a nice day.
Regards,
Torres. M
boydsmaps.com
I love the ones supposedly from Amazon
Where you are getting charged $948.22 for a camera that you ordered but they need to make sure the info is correct or, if you didn’t order the camera, please call them so that they can stop or reverse the charges on your credit card. Delete is the next action that I take.
"Everything I need can be found in the presence of God. Every. Single. Thing." Charley Hartmann 2/11/1956-6/11/2022
Nearly all credit cards and
Nearly all credit cards and banks offer an option to get an alert for any transaction over $x.
Configure those to send alerts for anything over $0.01. You'll know right away when someone's trying to charge the card. If the bank doesn't offer this service, choose a bank that does.
I prefer the email kind but texts alerts are also available.
fraud alert apps
My credit union has an app called "card guard" that really saved me a few years ago. It sends you a real-time notification when anything is charged to your enrolled cards. Even though I had never let their Visa card out of my possession, somehow some crook had gotten hold of the card info and started going to town making multiple charges of hundreds of dollars each. Fortunately, I was sitting idle at home when the app notified me of a big charge in a distant city. As I was opening the app to see the details, another big charge from a different merchant popped up. I immediately disabled that card in the app - just takes one click - and seconds after that another charge popped up, which was refused since the card was disabled in real time. I had to go through the usual fraud reporting routine for the initial charges, but if I hadn't been notified and immediately shut the card off it could have been a lot worse. I never did determine how my card info leaked out, but it was probably one of those massive data breaches that I have zero control over.