Credit Card Fraud.. A pre Christmas warning.

[uwila]

They even phoned me yesterday to confirm I had paid some money off my card. If anyone wants to pay money onto my card I am really happy for them to do it.

If you PM me all your card details, I'll put some dosh onto it Honest

[Paulus]

Talking of C/C fraud, we are off to Dublin for a long weekend soon with another couple. Giveaway flights from Ryan Air made it seem an affoardable venture!

Anyway, we've only just got round to booking accomodation. Used laterooms.com to book some place that sounded good value. The MD paid with her Credit Card. The confirmation e.mail from laterooms.com explained that no money will be taken now but the card details are passed to the hotel and used in case of us not turning up. Ok, whatever...

So two days later the MD gets a call from her card company fraud team asking about her card usage. In partricular a transaction for £3400 which they had already cleared plus others which they had bounced. The £3400 was at a tile shop in Ireland . Nothing to do with us!!

They were happy that it was fraudulent and said it will be refunded.

Then yesterday laterooms.com called to say that our accomodation was no not available and was belived to have ceased trading. Later on whilst they helped us with a new booking it transpired that the party who were marketing the hotel were not connected to it in any way and were using the booking system as a way of mining card numbers. Other customers had had their card details used fraudulently also.

It's all sorted now (we hope). We just have the cost of the beer to worry about now and the crapy exchange rate

Going to be a dear do!

Paul

[Frankie Price]

Sounds like the Sinowal/Mebroot drive-by download scam.
They reckon up to 500,000 bank account passwords and credit card numbers have been lifted using a key logger that sits in your computer operating system.
I've just had my laptop scrubbed and have re-installed Windows as I was getting some strange pop-up screens from unknown sources.

[Paulus]

Sounds like the Sinowal/Mebroot drive-by download scam.
They reckon up to 500,000 bank account passwords and credit card numbers have been lifted using a key logger that sits in your computer operating system.
I've just had my laptop scrubbed and have re-installed Windows as I was getting some strange pop-up screens from unknown sources.

By the sounds of it latrooms.com simply passed the card details to a criminal third party who just used them to buy stuff over the phone .

Perhaps more thorough checks could have been made by laterooms to confirm that the third party were in fact bona fide card merchants?

We have been informed that the Garda are investigating.

Paul

[Sean]

What do you do when a credit card company phones you up to 'check a transaction'. Invariably, they ask for me by name. Then they want to complete a security check.

Am I being paranoind by refusing to give them any security details when they have phoned me? They always seem surprised I am not prepared to divulge anything when they have called me!

They should only do the basic DPA questions name address date of birth post code, they should never ask for pin numbers, card numbers if they do hang up and ring the number that’s printed on your card.

Again there are lots of social engineering people out there. Lots of it has to do with Malware and this is organised crime they have teams that write the Mailware, distribute it, plus what they call identity collectors, all these teams work together and sale the complete package it’s a very complex operation and very well organised

Another one to look out for is the POS terminals, this is the thing that you put your card in to pay at the shop gangs are modifying them or at least trying to

They will be breaking them open to see where the tamper switches are, then they will practice drilling holes in the correct place so that you can squeeze in super glue to fix the switches in place, once they have mastered this they will try a remove one from a shop drill them and glue the switches then they can break them open and add anything they want, either small recording devices for card info and key stroke or transmitters.

If you own a shop

Keep an eye out for people getting unexpected engineer calls, that's usually how they swap them out once they figured out how to do it. The main targets are the WiFi and Bluetooth ones. They will remove one from one shop tamper with them then swap them in another store; unless the serial numbers are audited the store could be none the wiser. I have had first hand experience of this when I worked in the credit card industry.

[Allan Carr]

My CC company (Egg) are very twitchy at the moment. I have had 2 separate transactions bounced in 2 days as they are 'unusual'. One for my Ski holiday and one for house insurance. Hmmmmm I renew the insurance every year and have several holidays still better to be extra vigilant.
They even phoned me yesterday to confirm I had paid some money off my card. If anyone wants to pay money onto my card I am really happy for them to do it.

Egg can be very suspicious about transactions. I did a booze trip to Calais a couple of years ago and they would only allow one transaction on the card. Fortunately, I had other cards with me.

In Italy, the Pos terminals were required to have a write once/read many memory in them to record all transactions for 5 years. This was nothing to do with credit card fraud but to keep an eye on the shopkeepers to make sure they paid the correct taxes. I learnt about this when I was visiting our engineering workshop in Milan and wondered what the engineer was doing attacking this Pos terminal with a hammer and chisel. The memory is set into the terminal in a block of acrylic to prevent tampering. If anything goes wrong with it, it has to be chiselled out!

[Paulus]

By the sounds of it latrooms.com simply passed the card details to a criminal third party who just used them to buy stuff over the phone .

Perhaps more thorough checks could have been made by laterooms to confirm that the third party were in fact bona fide card merchants?

We have been informed that the Garda are investigating.

Paul

Just had an e.mail from laterooms. By the sound of it they realise that they have dropped a big clanger with this passing of card details.

They are apperently going to pay our hotel bill for us !!!!

That WOULD be good news. Iv'e been regretting ever buying the cheap flight tickets and almost didn't bother using them. We ended paying over a hundred quid more for the alternative accomodation which was a move in the wrong direction.

Fingers crossed.

Paul