Some scary info. NSR

[sailaway78]

I had to make a trip to the bank this AM, to rectify the charges someone in Los Angeles had made on my Visa. 1600 + bucks. To add insult to injury, they did it the day Gustav came to visit. Not a problem really, as the bank has been very good and has already credited my account back. But what I learned during my little jump through the hoops visit is flat scary. I knew there were card readers the thieves used. But they told me this morning that the going rate in this area is 50 to 60 bucks per card number. Wait persons carry a little card reader in their pocket, and just swipe the card. BINGO This part came as no big surprise. Even more scary than that is the newest scam. I didn't know that most of the credit card transactions are done through wireless systems. So the scammers just sit out in the parking lot with a laptop, and steal numbers. Apparently it depends on the level of incription the store has. Good thing, is if the merchant is careless and accepts a bogus card, they are the ones who lose in the end.

 

[Phil Herring]

That's surprising

Wireless encryption isn't all that easy to hack. Sorry to hear about your card.

 

[sailaway78]

Phil, if I was

If I was half as smart as some of these hackers and thieves, I could make a damn good living being honest. I said that to one of my neighbors, and he responded with, " Yeah, but then you might have to be at a certain place at a certain time."

 

[kloudie1]

Scary Notes

I have one of those stories too.. My gasoline card numbers were stolen by someone in the outgoing credit card management service .. (ExxMob credit cards are handled by a companies like Chase, or CitiBank).. Since I was an employee at the time, the dollars came straight out of my paycheck.. Uhhhh.. the person who got the card put $3400 on it within two weeks.. took about 3 months to get it straight! Really fun while my pay was being taken ! You would have thought that the security guys would have been tipped off when four tankfulls were drawn on the same day from two stations in the same area..Anyway my buddies at CitiBank got it squared away and all is good now.. but it was tense there for a while! With the high tech connections today, it would seem that as soon as the number was entered, the cameras would go to work and the station would be alerted..

 

[George]

Credit Card Theft

Not sure this is an appropriate topic for this forum, but since most of us do a lot of on-line purchasing, maybe it's worth kicking around.

Because the credit card companies have to eat the charges they have become very aggressive in trying to anticipate this kind of theft.

Once, a credit card number with PIN was worth a lot on the blackmarket; however, these numbers have now dropped significantly in price. As a result, the bad guys have to move very quick in a very short time.

I get calls from time to time asking about charges and my credit card company alerted me to a series of illegal charges within a couple of hours of the transaction. As a result, the crooks ended up with nothing. The downside was I had to get a new card which was FEDEXed to me over night.

 

[Terry in Naples]

Credit cards and cruising

I have friends that are in the 4th month of crusing in their boat in the USA. They traveled up the East coast of florida and all the way up to New York City then into the great Lakes. They will be gone until November.They called this week and told me someone had somehow gotten their Credit card info and had charged $13,000 in Oregon on the card. The bank would not give them any information they had until a police report was filed here in Naples. They closed the account. Now they have found out that there was also money missing from their checking (debit) account. (the account paying all the bills at home here) So this is a big deal and according to them the bank was NO HELP in stopping this. (they did, however, get most of the money back from the bank).
So beware, using a credit or debit card is not nearly as safe as we would like to think it is.

 

[r.w.landau]

Happened to our card.

They theif charged our account 6442.47 for a hotel in Australia. No one called, we found out when we got the bill. Not only that but there was a 193.27 charge for a transaction fee....
Still haven't heard what happened. The bank is working on it.
That was scarry!
r.w.landau

 

[Ross]

So far our card servers have called us to verify

questionable charges. 98 percent of our activity takes place from home or near home so a charge in Mexico raises all the red flags and we get a call.

 

[sailaway78]

Guess I was lucky

I guess I am lucky, when reading some of the other responses. Visa called me the same day, and canceled the card even before they called. They also told me at the bank this morning to not use a debit card as a debit card, but rather use it as a credit card. That way, according to them, you don't have to use a pin #, and makes it just a little more difficult for the thieves. I have been spoiled with a debit card, and almost never have more than 5 or 10 bucks in my pocket. Maybe I'll go back to the old fashioned way.

 

[Stillraining]

Fishing this spring

up out of Merritt BC.. My wife called frantically saying the bank wanted me to call because there is someone in Canada trying to make a purchase with our card right this instant .....There was...ME...

They were on it within 1 min.

 

[Deadhead]

Happened to My Girlfriend

Right after Katrina actually. Kathy found out someone in the New Orleans area had obtained her card # & run up several thousand in charges. It was her ATM card and it took a while for her bank to straighten it out but eventually she got fully refunded. Weird coincidence though.

 

[Dan Johnson]

N & E...

If you look closely at the card readers that most restaurants use, you will find them hard wired to a phone line. I'm not familiar with wireless card readers; they may exist but I haven't seen them in the telecom business area I'm involved in.

 

[dvideohd]

more details..

Years ago the KGB (or whatever division they were working on then...) would do a lot of "remote recording"... If you pointed their equipment to a CRT monitor, there was an electron beam coming out... and poof.. you could read the screen. Their "spy" equipment might be across the street from the the target monitor....

So there were the "Tempest" regulation made for such equipment.. part of why the military stuff - really secure stuff - was "behind the wall..."

When the wall went down - a lot of these newly unemployed folks found work in getting access to this secure information....

the story goes that one retailer lost over a billion dollars.... due to unsecured wifi equipment being used for credit card and finance applications... Just record it over the air - crack it later... sound familiar?

*************

so this is all real - very real stuff.. I am amazed if ANY of our credit card information is NOT hacked yet....

***************

Since we buy things for our boats with CC... and travel on them too... these are really on topic... Internationally.. I have heard about all kinds of nasty things happening...

--jerry

 

[JohnS12875]

wireless security

Current technology does make wireless internet difficult to crack, but that's only if the folks implementing it are careful and know what they're doing. There are videos on youtube of hackers demonstrating how to crack the encryption keys, and then using them to monitor wifi traffic.

On the other hand, I'd be surprised if retailers or companies that provide credit card/debit card services used wifi for credit card transactions. Wifi is fairly short distance technology, and the distance between the card terminal and the bank servers are typically miles. There's little benefit in using wireless in that connection with all the added risks.