stolen identity

Donna Dodd · From: Acworth, Georgia, USA

I never thought about it one way or another, but when it happened to me, I was so grateful to my banking institution for the security stops they had in place.

I received a call yesterday from an agent representing my bank. She asked a number of confusing, disjointed questions, and said my “usage profile” on my debit card was on temporary hold because of a “user profile” alert. We reviewed several of the pending transaction attempts before it really sunk in that someone was indeed attempting to assume my bankcard identity.

There are two things I want to mention about this:
First, I am so impressed that not ONE of the 16 transaction attempts yesterday was actually processed. Seems our banking system has a lot going on behind the scenes protecting its customers than I ever realized. All the attempts were on-line, where every e-merchant is required to ask the billing address of the credit card/bank account provided. Out of curiosity, I called one of the out of state merchants for any additional information he could possible provide about this attempt. They informed me that the call came in around midnight, and the impersonator gave the name Garcia, a California address and phone number, etc., all factious information just as an impersonator’s profile reveals. This is being investigated, and the bank is taking full action to locate this individual and press charges. Also, I am not liable for any of the transactions that may have inadvertently been approved. I am very pleased with the handling of this personal intrusion, and wanted to brag a little on current security tactics, and Sun Trust Banks of Atlanta. I’ve used them since 1971.
Second, On Sept. 3, I received an email with some very convincing Yahoo artwork and language advising me that my banking information needed to be updated in order to apply my yearly $19.95 charges for my POP3 account. A link was provided. I examined the questions on the link and immediately became suspicious when they asked for my bank security code and the three digit pin number adjacent to my card number. Of Course, I did NOT fill it out. However, I did go directly to my Yahoo Wallet account on-line and saw that my payment was processed in April. Since the card I had on file had an expiration date that had passed, I decided to go ahead and make the change even though my next payment transaction would not be until April 2004.

Whether or not any of that played a part in this identity theft, I cannot say. But I send this out as a warning to keep an eye on requested information about your personal accounts. Although I didn’t complete the dubious Yahoo update form, I believe that somehow this is part of the puzzle. And, I did report this peculiar incident to Yahoo’s Fraud Dept.

P.S. The crook tried to charge $5 for bird seed!! Does that seem strange to anyone else?

Just a reminder to us all to be ALERT!

HowardR · From: N.Y.C.-Fire Island-Asheville

Bobby Lee · From: Cloverdale, California, USA

Click-through links on emails are dangerous things. An email can be easily constructed that appears to take you to your PayPal, MSN or Yahoo account page, but the page itself is actually a cleverly disguised deception.

Check the URL. For example, I have received emails that look like they come from PayPal, and they contain what appears to be a legit PayPal link. But when you click on the link, the address bar shows http://paypal.something.com - NOT a real PayPal address. The page looks just like a PayPal page, but it's NOT PAYPAL!

A real PayPal link has https://something.paypal.com. The 's' makes it a secure link, and the "paypal.com" guarantees that you are on one of PayPal's servers. The crooks rely on people's ignorance of those things.

------------------

Bobby Lee - email: quasar@b0b.com - gigs - CDs, Open Hearts
Sierra Session 12 (E9), Williams 400X (Emaj9, D6), Sierra Olympic 12 (C6add9),
Sierra Laptop 8 (D13), Fender Stringmaster (E13, A6),
Roland Handsonic, Line 6 Variax

Joey Ace · From: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Bill Ford · From: Graniteville SC Aiken

ALSO!!!!!!!!!!,Do not,repeat,Do not give out your SS# to anyone that is questionable.
Be sure of who you are doing business with,that goes for any #s that can acess any purchase or bank.

Once upon a time about 10 years ago,someone got my information #s,etc,and quess who had to fix it(we did),my credit rateing went from #1,the best,to I could not co-sign a $500 limit mastercard for a relative.
Been there done that,be extra carefull,don't trust anyone!!!!!!!!

My credit is still a shambles..

------------------
Bill Ford

[This message was edited by Bill Ford on 14 September 2003 at 02:06 PM.]

Donna Dodd · From: Acworth, Georgia, USA

Bobby Lee,
I just went back to look at the url on that Yahoo message - LOW AND BEHOLD: [mailto:billing@yahoo-services.com] The real address would read billing@yahoo.com/
and the information link was http://www.yahoo-wallet.com/, which nolonger exists. The REAL url is www.wallet@yahoo.com
Great advise from all of you. Thanks! Even though I did NOT fill out the fake form, I think it's too coincidential that only days later someone began using my card. I'll bet I fell for something that I just can't recall. Thanks again for the advise and the great examples of how these cheapo crooks operate. At least the birdseed thing makes sense now.

donna

[This message was edited by Donna Dodd on 14 September 2003 at 04:39 PM.]

Tony Prior · From: Charlotte NC

Last year I noticed 2 transactions for $650 each from IBM corp.

Well after flipping and stressing out for a few minutes I realized they were fraud.

I contacted my CC company and they pretty much just erased them..but I, Inspector Clusoe that I am took it further.

I contacted IBM credit and after about 4 hours of back and fourth discovered someone had taken my credit card off line and purchased 2 PC's from the IBM website.

Now here is the strange and curious thing, the credit card number used had expired long before the transaction..they actually had a delivery address in NYC for the 2 PC's purchased..and here is the big one..

It took all the 4 hours to actually find someone who could make sense of the transactions..

then all of a sudden..

I actually received a call from an IBM website customer service rep who told me she was going to take care of the whole thing for me. She processed the CC refunds in less than 30 minutes , all this in the same day without any investigation..When I asked her about the delivery information in NYC she blew me off and stated that they would not call the Police or retrieve the PC's purchased in the fraudelent transaction..I really thought that was strange..She said she was assigned to the case which didn't have a case #. I asked her how a CC which had expired could be used and she said it was a mistake at order entry and was probably a forced entry. I asked her where she lived and she said..NYC !!

Lets see, the crooks live in NY, they ordered two PC's that were delivered to a NYC address, the customer service rep lives in NYC..

Now it's full firewall with full time PC security. The credit card company did tell me that the CC# was probably acquired a year or so before the purchase..this is common according to them and with the new questions and customer responses that are mandatory for the CC transaction it really leaves the retail store fully responsible for fraudelent transactions..which I was recently told by BOA that are on the decline...

Also on all of the websites which may have a financial link, it is good practice to change the password monthly.

tp

[This message was edited by Tony Prior on 15 September 2003 at 05:14 AM.]

Donna Dodd · From: Acworth, Georgia, USA

What a story, Tony! Interesting to know that the merchants are responsible. That's the way it should be, I think. More people REALLY need to know more about the URL deception Bobby Lee talked about. That turned the light on for me, and I'm now on a mission!!

Joey Ace · From: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Related Story in today's news.

Rick Johnson · From: Wheelwright, Ky USA

Great post! We all need to watch each
others back. I registerd with Ebay a while
back and they informed me that they would
never contact me about any personal info
I gave them, sure enough I started getting
emails that looked like Ebay official
emails but were not.
Lets all be carefull!

------------------
Rick Johnson

Joey Ace · From: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

I have a second VISA card with a low limit that I use only on line.

My regular cards never see Internet use.

Bobby Lee · From: Cloverdale, California, USA

Donna's yahoo example makes a good point: the dot and the slash are the only real separators in a URL. A dash is treated just like a letter of the alphabet.

Soooo... yahoo-wallet.com is NOT a part of the yahoo.com domain. Someone totally unrelated to Yahoo can register yahoo-wallet.com, security-yahoo.com, yahoo_account_balance.com or any number of variations.

Another trick they use is HTML email. They can show paypal.com as a link, but if you right click and check properties, you'll see that it really takes you to www.bogus-paypal.com.

Beware of links in emails. They aren't always what they appear to be.

------------------

Bobby Lee - email: quasar@b0b.com - gigs - CDs, Open Hearts
Sierra Session 12 (E9), Williams 400X (Emaj9, D6), Sierra Olympic 12 (C6add9),
Sierra Laptop 8 (D13), Fender Stringmaster (E13, A6),
Roland Handsonic, Line 6 Variax

[This message was edited by Bobby Lee on 15 September 2003 at 04:43 PM.]

erik · Posted 15 Sep 2003 4:17 pm

joey wrote:

Joey Ace · From: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Yes, they did exactly that.
Both cards are from the same bank, so they aren't loosing anything.

Donna Dodd · From: Acworth, Georgia, USA

I just got an email from Bobby Lee with some surprising findings: He checked the on-line registry to see if the owner of www.yahoo-wallet.com was identified. And he IS!!!!! Although the authorities are probably already on this guy's trail, I will definitely be placing some calls tomorrow! Thanks for the info, b0b!!

Donna Dodd · From: Acworth, Georgia, USA

Although my debit card has remained blocked since Sept. 13, a few charges have somehow slipped through. One of the charges was to www.picturetrail.com. I had the idea that the crook may have uploaded pictures of himself or family members. Of course that would have been a REALLY stupid crook. Anyway, I contacted a representative in their customer service group. I explained the situation, and asked their help. They were extremely eager to determine if any discerning information was on the account. Here’s his final email to me with some interesting observations:

quote:
And the account that was upgraded has zero
pics in it and the registered email address is an invalid yahoo
address. But based on the username of the account, mynga, we know
somebody from Indonesia probably opened that account (that's an
indonesian sort of word). We've found that some compromised cards
somehow make it to indonesia and it appears a common thing with some
young folks there to look up stolen card info and use them to transact
on the net with them. We get about two or three cases every month with
this same trend, almost no credit card fraud on our site except for
these few instances from indonesia. Seems there's an indonesian
underground site with such stolen card info out there.

I'm afraid that's all we know about this.

We've blocked the account from being used but since it has zero pics I
have a feeling someone was just testing out the waters to see what
would happen.

My sense is that your card info has made the rounds on various
illegal/underground sites and various people who know about such sites
just pluck the info and use it at random, I don't think it's one
particular person using your card for all those transactions showing up
on your card.

Joe, PT Support.

David L. Donald · From: Koh Samui Island, Thailand

Donna You'll love this one.
A few visits back to NYC ago I was using my old ATT calling card number.
Apparently some one had a phone rigged to get the numbers or a camera on the keypad.
i tried to call home and low and behold the card was blocked.
I called AT&T, irate, and they said I had unusual traffic I explained I normally live in france and was on a US trip.. they asked, are you in Texas now???? Well no I am in NYC. Were you in Texas today? no, just NYC.

I had appeared to call Kuala Lumpor for 9 hours, and Afganistan for 12 and Korea for 5 hours.

It seems some call home stores have a scam of grabbing numbers and making trunk calls on them to a forgien local operator, who then transfers the callers to multiple other people therem, leaving the line open the whole time.
Amoung MANY other shorter calls.

So my one day calling card bill was $4,500 US....

Since several of the calls over lapped and also over lapped with calls I was legitimately making in NYC, they pulled the plug.
A computer program saw usage that couldn't be explained by logic and flagged it.

All charges were dropped and I got a new number, but the 7 page fax of the bill was quite impressive. I still have it somewhere.

When I fly I charge it on my AMEX so they can look back and see an airline charge and understand I am on the road and not block that card too.

Those internet scammers are very good and finding fools, they mainly seem to target people who aren't liekly to be internet savy.
But will send out bulk one way or another.

Donna Dodd · From: Acworth, Georgia, USA

Now, THAT's a phone bill to say the least David. OK, my question is this - do they really investigate these scams and do anything about it? I've thought about all the possibilities with using personal financial data on-line. However, even if you limit credit card usage to dining or travel, think of the risk with a simple situation like the following:

You give your credit card to the waiter. He takes it back to the back for processing. Puts a mint on top of the transaction slip. Makes note of the number, the three digit security number, and your name. He comes back and says, "Last name Miller, huh? I have friends who live in Canton, where are you from?" Customer says "oh, we live in Cleveland." Waiter says "my college roommate is from Cleveland, and I went home with him for Thanksgiving. I think it was Clear Springs subdivision, or something like that. Customer: "There's a Holly Springs near us. But we're in a great little neighborhood called Cherry Cove." Now he has all your information (if he wants it)and can charge to his heart's content. It's so easy -- but what can anyone REALLY do to totally avoid it - besides living like a hermit? My lesson in all this is that I need to check my statements better and be aware of the obvious precautions with all transactions.

Bobby Lee · From: Cloverdale, California, USA

Pay cash whenever you can.

David L. Donald · From: Koh Samui Island, Thailand

It is my understanding that AT&T actively pursues and prosecuits these scammers if they can find them. I would guess these Texas call calling stores got nailed at the very least. But I never called back AT&T to ask.

Donna Dodd · From: Acworth, Georgia, USA

David - if you ever find out, let me know. I'm out of hormone medication and have a bullet left in my gun!

Donna Dodd · From: Acworth, Georgia, USA

Forum Index > Computers		Next oldest topic :: Next newest topic