06 April 2016

The other shoe

I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. According to the dictionary, that means I've been "awaiting a seemingly inevitable event, especially one that is not desirable." The other shoe dropped last night. Fairly late in the evening, I got an e-mail from the security department at my bank — credit union, really — in the U.S. I called the bank. The man on the phone told me there had been a suspicious attempted transaction on my Visa card and wanted to know if I was aware of it.


I told him that, yes, I knew it might happen and told him about the mysterious iPhone I received last Friday. He asked me some questions — birth date, address, telephone number, last four digit of my Social Security number, the security code on the Visa card, and so on. He wanted to verify another couple of recent transactions on the credit card. I confirmed that those were legitimate.


And then he said he was going to close the account immediately and send me a new card, with a new number. He said the suspicious transaction had to do with an attempted payment to a PayPal account. That's all the information I got last night. I might call and ask a few more questions today.


Earlier in the day, I had written to the company that sent me that expensive iPhone out of the blue last week (see my posts here over the past few days). I'll still be curious to read the answers to the questions I asked in my e-mail. However, I'll probably never know exactly what happened. I have to send the iPhone back, of course, and I guess I should change the password on some other accounts I have on on-line shopping sites.


So that's that. The shoe fell with a thud. It was anticlimactic. Included here are a few recent photos of Callie the collie, taken on our morning walks and with a couple of different cameras.

23 comments:

  1. A shoe dropping is better than a shoe thrown...

    Glad this seems to have turned out OK. Last year, I someone used my credit card to buy purses at Bloomingdale's. And no, it wasn't me or Danny. I still haven't figured that one out.

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    1. I don't know how the scammer got my card number. I can't find it on the seller's site. Maybe I just don't know where to look.

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    2. Ken,

      Most probably the company's database ( company which sent you the iPhone) has been hacked and they don't even know about it. Someone is having a good time using it for various on-line shopping and it may have just happened that during their on-line musical chair to avoid being detected ( shipment versus credit cards) they use you shipping address on the BNP Paribas purchase and your Visa card to make a payment for a purchase destined for another address via Pay Pal.

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    3. What a tangled web. Comme l'a dit CHM, la réalité dépasse la fiction.

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    4. What a tangled web. Comme l'a dit CHM, la réalité dépasse la fiction.

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  2. Internet shopping is the most common way to have your card details stolen. The other way is to let the cashier take it out of your sight. Both of these things have happened to us. Nick's card number was used by some idiot to pay for a county court fine! The thief was obviously traceable but we still have no idea how he got the number.
    Recently his card was cloned by the waiter in an Indian restaurant, who pretended that the portable card machine wasn't working and had the card in his hand when he went to find a replacement. It thought it looked suspicious at the time and noticed he did the same thing to other customers. Some weeks afterwards fraudulent transactions started to appear on his account.
    Being without your card while you wait for a new one can be a real pain. Which is why I have three, just in case! Honest!

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    1. Jean, I have three cards as well, so this won't be really inconvenient.

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  3. I hope you didn't phone a phone number from the Email, I'm sure that you didn't but some of these fraudsters can be very clever and persistent. You gave somebody a lot of information I hope it really was your bank. Good luck, I hope it works out OK for you...

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    1. You are making me paranoid. I just called the bank again, using the official number that I recognize. I got confirmation of all that was said when I called last night. The credit card account has been shut down and the bank is beginning its investigation into the fraudulent activity.

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    2. I'm sorry to have worried you but I was getting paranoid on your behalf. I'm glad it is all getting sorted. Its a sad state of affairs, but not unexpected, that criminals will often stay one step ahead of measures designed to deter them. I always want to trust people but these days we have to be so careful.

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    3. Unfortunately, you are right.

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    4. I was thinking as Alex is, and glad you were able to confirm that the caller was legit. You have an army of people supervising you and worrying on your behalf!

      Supposed to be 88 here today.

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  4. I've had card details stolen before I even received the card. All card numbers are out there published on the internet. Sometimes it's just a matter of the fraudsters using a card number they've obtained from an easy to obtain list of issued numbers. We always keep our limit low to try and mitigate the possible activity. The person who used my card found this out when they tried to buy a fridge and some other household goods.

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    1. I've had a bad spell of incidents related to debit and credit cards recently. I lost my French debit card back in November, when I was traveling. And now this. As if there wasn't already enough to worry about...

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  5. The weird thing is that they sent the phone to YOUR address. Were you set up for "one click" purchasing? I mean... what do these thieves usually do? put in their own addresses for delivery?? That seems like an easy way to catch them, eh?

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    1. No, I don't do one-click purchasing. I don't understand the scam either. It just occurred to me that maybe the scammer sends me the merchandise, pretenss to pay the seller, but then gets me to pay him or her, thinking I might just refuse to return the phone. The scam is targeting the seller more than the buyer... Who knows? Maybe that doesn't make sense.

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  6. yay Callie! and i'm very sorry for your bank woes. we had several incidents all together - each of us had to cancel and get new cards within a couple weeks. it was very frustrating.

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    1. sorry it has happened to you. It is kind of discouraging.

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    2. sorry it has happened to you. It is kind of discouraging.

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  7. Things like this are the new norm. It's always good to have more than one credit card to use in the meantime. DD SIL DH and I all had an IHG credit card, DD and mine were hacked (a large internal one of credit card company) and the other two were left alone.
    So it goes. I let a stranger into my laptop because of a scam once- Lewis had to erase everything and reinstall stuff- now I am more aware of the dangers.

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    1. You are too trusting, I guess. This is the first time, I believe, that I've been involved in a credit card scam. It's always good to be aware of dangers -- makes me think of the street smarts you need to survive and prosper in a city like Paris.

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  8. I put just about everything on my credit card and pay it off around the 1st of each month. The points add up and I get cash cards for the points. On the 2nd of January of this year I went online to transfer my payment and a charge had been made for a large amount on the 1st that I had not made. Turns out it was two airline tickets to China charge on my credit card. My card was immediately cancelled and a new one issued. I received my new one within a week which wasn't too much of an inconvenience other than having to change all the automatic payments I had on it. I can't say what I would like to do to the culprits. Evidently, it is a common occurrence, but it sure would be nice to have all the culprits caught and prosecuted! I do a lot of online shopping mainly because of convenience and to buy things that I can't get locally.

    I am also one of the millions of government employees that had all their personal information compromised by hackers. It just the pitfalls of the world we live in today.

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    1. Well at least I didn't have any automatic payments on that card. I also do a lot of on-line shopping because we are so far from any city. And yes, people who are worried about their privacy now -- well, it's probably too late. Everybody has access to everything.

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