<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div><div>Hi All,<br><br></div>I'd like to start by saying I'm very sorry
that you had to go through this process, as having your personal info
stolen and used against you is never any fun. I hope I'm not intruding
on the thread, as I was unable to attend the conference (company only
pays for one a year, and we're not a Perl shop, so YAPC lost out).<br><br></div>Speaking from personal experience, from having this situation happen to me twice, I'd like to give a few insights. Take it for what it's worth, as obviously, there's criminals out there of all types.<br>
<br>--<br><br></div>First, call your bank's fraud dept, and report this asap (obviously). They may want you to stop by a branch and sign an affidavit stating that these charges were not made by you. Next up, file a police report; the local police aren't going to do a darn thing to help you, but that case number you provided just adds to your case (you wouldn't call the cops on yourself if you were just trying to get out of charges you made). At that point, you should have the charges reversed, a new card with a new number issued, and chances are, you'll never hear a word about it again.<br>
<br>Now, on to the fun part... Very commonly, credit card theft is a multi-tier system. At some point, you probably encountered a waiter or bar-tender that was less than scrupulous. We are all too accustomed to letting our credit/debit cards out of our sight at bars and restaurants when we run a tab, or leave a card in a ticket book to be run by a waiter. This waiter or bartender will then take your card, run it for your order, and also run it through a skimmer. Most of the time, the transaction you made with the establishment will go through as expected. This puts some degree of separation between the theft and the legitimate transaction.<br>
<br></div>This bartender or waiter will then get paid a flat rate (think $25-50 per stolen card) by another party. When this has happened to me, I have found by searching through historical data, that it is normally followed within a day or two by several VERY small transactions... A dollar here, two dollars there. The point is to make sure that the account is active and has funds without alerting the owner, so the transactions are of amounts that you won't notice unless you're watching carefully. After that, often the card info is sold again to a party who will collect cards until they have enough to convince someone to run a batch. With enough money, its not hard to have 500 cards made with whatever you want encoded onto the mag strips.<br>
<br>This is the point, that in my experience, one gets taken to the cleaners. A criminal now has a cloned copy of your credit card in hand. The first time this happened to me, there was an attempted purchase of a 3D TV totaling over $8000. Since it was in a city on the opposite side of the country, my bank noticed and gave me a courtesy call. The second time, someone attempted to make a $30k cash advance against my account at a casino. This was also enough to alert my bank that something was probably wrong, leading to a courtesy call.<br>
<br></div>Tl;dr: It's entirely possible that someone at the restaurant in question swiped your info and went on a shopping spree, but more likely than not, you were compromised sometime in the past, the restaurant transaction is still being processed, and the timing of the whole ordeal was just a coincidence.<br>
<br>For what it's worth... hopefully I was at least able to provide some insight, and give you a few places to start looking for foul play.<br><br></div><div>Hope you get it all sorted out quickly!<br><br></div><div>Regards,<br>
<br></div><div>Peter<br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 1:23 PM, Jonathan Rockway <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jrockway@cpan.org" target="_blank">jrockway@cpan.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Hi everyone,<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>--jrockway</div></div>
<br><br>
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