Fraudulent Visa transaction - any advice?

Checked my (AIB) Visa bill last night and there was a transaction located in Vilnius 2 weeks ago for over €300.

Rang Visa and a very efficient woman entered a query on the transaction which they will investigate (she asked me all the daft questions you can imagine about whether the card was out of my sight over the last month etc.) and if it turns out to be genuinely mine I'll have to pay a fee of €3.90 (I think). In the meantime it will be taken off the bill and the resolution will take up to 30 days. Good customer service and I'm very happy.

Afterwards it did occur to me that it was surely surprising that I wasn't offered a new Visa account with different details. After all, somebody has my details and is clearly prepared to use them.

Has anybody else had this experience and were you offered a new account? Should I call them and get them to do so myself? Or have the banks given up on security and the only real protection you can have is to religiously check your statements (I must admit to being semi-delinquent in this regard...)?

I had some unusual transactions on my Visa card some years ago and they sorted it very quickly, but you riase a very good point, I was not offered a new account. Saying that no other unusual transactions occured since.........

I had this problem with my TSB laser card about a year ago - about €1000 worth of transactions. I was refunded the money and I asked the bank should I change the card. They said not to bother. Seeing as how it's the bank that suffers in a case like this (i.e. when you notice such transactions) I was surprised, to say the least. Made me a little suspicious too, I have to say...

This happened to me before. I cancelled the card and requested my bank to do a chargeback on the authorised payments. I got a full refund and a new card. In general this would seem to be the most prudent course of action. The terms & conditions of cards may be more restrictive these days and may put more of an onus/excess on the cardholder.

I just happened to be looking at my online account yesterday and noticed €700 in two transactions in Australia. I rang BOI and they stepped through another 4 or 5. In total, there was about €3000 spent (I wouldn't mind but they appeared to be quite keen on Woolworths). BOI had tried to contact me last week but couldn't get through so they had been alerted to some strange goings on. First of all there were a couple of small charges (about 90c/€1) just to make sure the account was active. Then they must have gone ahead and 'burned' a real card with my details and went shopping in Woolies.

They cancelled the card there and then and said I'd have a new one by the end of the week and verified that I'd be refunded the missing €700.

What about the other €2,300? You implied there was €3,000 of dodgy charges in total?

By the way are they charging you for the new card?

So the answer appears to be that the banks are happy enough to bear the loss and, by deduction, the cost to them of encouraging the cancellation and redesignation of a compromised account outweighs the benefit of nullifying the information that the criminals hold about their customers.

It makes one doubt the sincerity of their campaign against identity fraud.

Don't the banks recover some or all of this money from the end merchants so they are not always totally out of pocket?

extopia, I had brought the two statemented transactions to their attention and they said that a correction would appear in my next statement. He then went through the other transactions, one by one, ensuring that they too were dodgy. I'm assuming all transactions that I didn't genuinely make would be refunded.

I had fraudulent internet use of my Tesco Visa Card last year. The bank spotted it before it was debited to my account. They rang to check if the transaction was mine and when they knew it wasn't immediately issued new cards/account number.

Tesco Visa tend to phone from time to time to check transactions they see as unusual so full marks to them.

Guess John Rusnak would never have got away with it if he'd worked for Tesco.....

Clubman's probably hit the nail on the head - if the banks aren't bearing the cost of the fraud (because the retailers are liable) they simply couldn't be bothered bearing the cost of anti-fraud measures over and above the standard product upgrades like chip and pin.

Individualised security measures generate complexity for the banks so they will try to avoid them and walk the tight line between customer distrust of credit cards and the massive profits they generate through minimising expensive cash handling, the margin they skim off the retailers and the grotesque interest rates they lure their customers into paying by ensuring they automatically "grant" limit increases to ensure an ongoing negative balance.

oysterman said:

Clubman's probably hit the nail on the head - if the banks aren't bearing the cost of the fraud (because the retailers are liable) they simply couldn't be bothered bearing the cost of anti-fraud measures over and above the standard product upgrades like chip and pin.

Click to expand...

I don't think that I hit that particular nail on the head to be honest...

It's not too far off the proverbial head of some-or-other nail, though...!

But then I find it hard to speak well of credit card/credit agencies, as a 'breed'...

Has everybody on AAM taken to speaking in riddles since the move from ezBoard to vBulletin or something? Or is it just me finding it difficult to interpret many posts these days...?

Looks clear enough to me, Clubman. Perhaps it's you? Perhaps it's not always necessary to spell out every possible interpretation of every post?

Probably me so. Perhaps time to take a break and concentrate on those admin tasks as I promised last week ...

after I closed aam on friday last i check my mbna credit card online, to discover that there was an unposted transaction for €1 outstanding which after reading the above posts sort of had me worried as everyone knows you cant use a credit card for very small amounts. checked with mbna and turns out paypal was the offender after i have given them my new card details. dont know if they actually intend to debit the account or just 'testing ' it

Yes paypal does this, and as far as I know they tell you about it when you sign up (at least they told me, but it was several years ago). Usually it's a small deposit to your account which you get to keep (at least it used to be), so nothing wrong with that!

hiya,

i work for a leading credit card firm in england and have worked in the Chargeback dept for many years now.

when a customer disputes a transaction the first thing to do is get a dispute form out to the customer, when that arrives back it gives the bank the authority to request a copy of the sales voucher(visa regs state the merchant has up to 60 days to provide), when this is received if it turns out to be fraud i.e someone elses details then the bank have the right to return the charge back to that merchants bank and credit the a/c accordingly.

it would be then that the bank block the card and issue replacement with new details. however, if a customer disputes numerous transactions or its an already known fraudulent merchant then the card is blocked immediately. i really think this is down to the individual organisation.

if the transaction is from a counterfeit card then the bank used to take the loss but with chip & pin its different. the liability is on the merchants side, if a card is a "chip & pin" and the merchant accepts it as a signature then if it turns out to be fraud the merchant looses. but the customer will not stand the loss unless they have given their pin number to a 3rd party or allowed access to it by writing it down(even when disguised as a phone no etc)

now i hope this clarifies things a bit.

sinead

xx

>>but the customer will not stand the loss unless they have given their pin number to a 3rd party or allowed access to it by writing it down(even when disguised as a phone no etc)

How on earth does the bank determine this? By asking the customer?