General Chat

OH had a phone call from "the security department of her credit card company" saying there was a problem with her card and asking for her password.

Assumed it was a scam, ended the call and phoned the company on a known number from a different phone.

After a lot of hassle over identification it turned out to be a genuine query due to a failed transaction with a home delivery food company yesterday.

Thing is, a bank or credit card company always asks you to identify yourself by a password or security questions but should there not be a simple way for you to identify them e.g. by them telling you your account number; recent transaction; other cardholder on the account; security question they have on record; or suchlike that a cold caller scammer would not have access to?

Ah - but their excuse is Data Protection ;-)

Hope its all sorted out now

something like that could cause a "victim" to drop their guard, methinks....


possibly a prearranged secret question, and a riposte' might work......

I had a similar call some years ago, and also thought it was a scam

I asked the man on the other hand "how do I know this is not a scam?"

He told me to hang up and then phone the number on the back of my card

It was genuine .......................

but in my case someone had obtained the card number and used it in Quebec to charge about $1,000 worth

We were not in Quebec!!

I was told to cut up my card, and they sent me a new one.

OH had that happen to him, but in his case the Credit Card Co. stopped the payment, then e-mailed him, texted him and rang up, all within 5 minutes, to check whether the payment was genuine.

It was in eastern Europe somewhere, so definitely fraudulent.

The current advise is to return the phone call from a different phone as is been known for scammers to still be on the line.
If that's not possible, then ring the phones' own number. It should be 'engaged' as you are calling it yourself!

It said on the news last night that BT are about to make it impossible for the caller to stay on the line like that.

Putting down the phone will cut off each end of the call.

that would be a good thing sharron.

we had a call when in Teneriffe, OH tried to use one of our cards (the one we use for on line sales so a very small amount on there). when he phoned them they said there had been unusual use in another country (not spain), somebody had tried to withdraw an amount that was larger than the card limit so that was blocked, they tried three times, each time with a smaller amount an the third try the card was blocked. We had to have a new card when we got home. Luckily it was not the main card we were using.

Interesting in the paper they published the worst cards for security and the best. the best were RBS, Nat West, M&S and one other I can't remember.

Got to say that Barclays are crash hot on security. They have rung me twice over the past couple of years when I have made an unusual purchase quite different from anything their records show.

I also like the little machine you get for online banking both at home and in the branch. Seems safer to me.