Bank Card Fraud

I've mentioned several times the importance of letting your bank know when you go abroad, so that your card isn't blocked.

Someone's gonna get a shock when they finish their lunch!

LloydsTSB sent me a text message, and I called them back. Someone in America opened a restaurant tab using my debit card details at 18:20 our time... By 18:35 it was flagged as stolen and blocked.

What size bill have the fraudsters run up before the bank blocked the card? A stunning £00000.01

Result!

That was super efficient I must say. Any idea how come they had your card details, or shouldn't that be aired on the forum?

Yeah - I was quite pleased by that one

Tom Mc wrote:

Any idea how come they had your card details, or shouldn't that be aired on the forum?

That is a mystery ... it's not been used online or at new petrol stations for months... other than Play, Amazon and Paddocks...

Probably from some website or company I've used in the last year or so that's had their databases hacked or bins raided.

Few years ago I used a card at a Jet petrol station, and a few days later it was used to buy online Vodafone credit. A few weeks later my replacement card was also used at Jet and then a few days later bought O2 credit ...

When I was doing online security work I'd often see e-commerce sites being hit with thousands of fake transactions just trying different card details - maybe some time ago I missed one of those payments that verified my card as valid?

We had a similar issue with the credit card whilst in Norway last year. We had told them we were going abroad and had used the cards in Norway but part way through the holiday the card stopped working with an odd message on the chip and pin machine (It was in Norwegian) roughly translated it said please contact the card issuer.

Apparently we suddenly has some English transactions go through which looked odd to them. They thought it was odd as we were in Norway! So it does pay to let then know you are going abroad.