Yesterday, I got my mastercard bill. There was an entry on it I wasn’t expecting. The sum was £173.90, that’s a fair sum when you haven’t spent it. I rang the credit card company to report this mysterious expenditure on my card. They said they would put me on hold while they checked it out. The nice lady was gone about 5 minutes. While I listened to some dreadful music, she went and found out where my card had been used.

When she got back, she told me two things; what kind of company had processed the charge (they sell sewer pumps!) and that it wasn’t fraud…

I was fascinated that she was so sure it wasn’t fraud, since I had no memory of purchasing any sewer pumps – ever. She explained the spending wasn’t the pattern used for fraud. She explained in quite some detail exactly how to commit online fraud safely. If I were looking for tips, I would have got plenty. She showed me how how the sewer pump spending wasn’t like that. I was really worried about ID fraud and thought someone may have somehow got hold of my details. She said no, it wasn’t that either.

Well, rather than spend my day guessing and getting there by a process of elimination, I asked her to put me out of my misery and tell me how it could have happened “Oh, the person entering the credit card number online probably just missed by one digit”. What? How could this be? What about all that security we are assured of online, I thought.

“But what about the 3 digit security code?”, I asked, “doesn’t that protect me?” The answer was somewhat surprising, though I wonder why I am still surprised at financial institutions. “Some companies check the 3 digit code and others just go by expiry date, if you have the same expiry date it might go through”. Then I was told that, in order for them to investigate it, I had to write a letter post it to them.

After I got off the phone, it occurred to me that someone had, presumably erroneously, used my credit card to make a purchase online. They hit a lucky number and my card was used instead of theirs. That this is possible, is scary. Their name did not match the card number. The delivery address wouldn’t match the card address, the 3 digit code wouldn’t have matched and the valid from date was probably different too. Yet none of these security checks seemed to matter. After all those failures by the credit card company, I had to write and inform them before they would investigate the claim. Credit card companies are fully aware that each step you ask people to take, there will be a fall off percentage. In other words, some people won’t phone and report it, some will phone, but not get as far as writing the letter, leaving the customer liable for the spend and not the company.

How easy is then to commit online fraud? Probably not that difficult given a bit of insider knowledge. It seems it’s not fraud we really have to worry about. It’s the lack of security – that and the fees we pay to cover those shortcomings.

Does anyone else have this kind of experience?

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