Credit card warning

Darren Duncan darren at darrenduncan.net
Tue Jun 4 16:14:43 PDT 2013


On 2013.06.04 1:23 PM, Jonathan Rockway wrote:
> I went to a restaurant last night called El Chile and payed with a credit card.
>   This morning, about $5000 of fraudulent activity appeared on my statement, but
> I wasn't charged for dinner.  This leads me to believe they may have nefariously
> taken my credit card number, and I wanted to warn everyone else who was there
> last night to take a look at their credit card activity.
>
> I have no hard evidence that this is what actually happened, but the timing does
> feel very suspect, so I wanted to let everyone else know.

Does your credit card statement show only posted transactions or also authorized 
ones?  Credit card transactions don't usually appear on statements until a day 
or three after you were at the store, so that may be why the restaurant meal 
wasn't charged yet.

In that case, it may have been that any skimming may have happened days earlier, 
and the fraudulent transactions occurred before you were at the restaurant, and 
only showed up on the statement after.

Also, even if the skimming happened at a particular place, the business owners 
might not even be aware of it.  There is criminal activity going on now where 
people steal and replace the card readers of businesses with modified versions 
that send them card data, while otherwise seeming to act normally.  Some 
businesses guard against this, such as by adding special markings to the bottom 
of the device and checking regularly if they're still there, or otherwise 
locking down physically or stowing away the device, but not all do.

-- Darren Duncan



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