For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
#1643341
Today, I tried to buy something online from the local Argos and my card was declined. So I tried a different card, which was also declined. We then went to the Argos store and tried to make the purchase there with a 3rd card. This on was a card of my wife’s where I am a cardholder. Argos offered Apple Pay, so I tried that.... and the card was declined!

So far, 3 attempts, 3 different cards... all declined in the space of 15 minutes.

At this point my wife tried with her card which was accepted (the card she used was the account I had had declined a few minutes earlier)

I then had the pleasure of 3 calls from the fraud departments of the 3 cards.

The only other thing of note is that I restored my iPhone the other day and had to set the cards up again.

So, we’re all these declines linked? I assume that the banks actually speak to one another about this?

Obviously, the accounts were paid up and within their credit limits so I’m curious as to what this happened.

Any thoughts....
#1643377
Flyin'Dutch' wrote:
PaulB wrote:Any thoughts....



Remember those emails.......


:D


Indeed.... however, they were GMail emails.... I never use GMail for anything serious.

Of course the banks in some ways don’t help themselves by calling you from a different number than is on the card (or withholding CLI) then wanting to go through security. I accept that we can’t rely on CLI as it’s easy to spoof.

That said, the banks must have a really difficult job trying to sort out the genuine from the fake in almost real time.
#1643408
My main card was blocked two years ago, but I got a call from the bank beforehand. It turned out that my card had been used for a cash withdrawal in the US about fifteen minutes before I had paid for my groceries at home. PROB90, it had been skimmed in Colorado when I was there some six weeks before I got the call. So my card was blocked to protect against further fraudulent charges.

But that was ONE card, of course. Not several.
#1643437
Cards used to be cloned by beings “skimmed” by an unscrupulous staff member at a shop or restaurant or by adding a device to a cash machine and recording the pin as it’s entered.

Are there any other ways to clone cards given that nowadays you rarely hand the card over. With things like Apple Pay the card number isn’t even transferred to the device so on the face of it, cloning is already more difficult, meaning that thit criminals will have presumably got more sophisticated.
#1643474
PaulB wrote:
Are there any other ways to clone cards given that nowadays you rarely hand the card over. With things like Apple Pay the card number isn’t even transferred to the device so on the face of it, cloning is already more difficult, meaning that thit criminals will have presumably got more sophisticated.

There must be; a few years ago I noticed two ATM withdrawls of £92 each on my debit card statement. Queried them with the bank; they asked had I been in Canada recently.
I replied I'd never been there or for that matter the USA.
The withdrawls were for Can$200 each from an ATM in Montreal.
I got my money back but how did they get my card number and PIN?
#1643479
chevvron wrote:There must be; a few years ago I noticed two ATM withdrawls of £92 each on my debit card statement. Queried them with the bank; they asked had I been in Canada recently.
I replied I'd never been there or for that matter the USA.
The withdrawls were for Can$200 each from an ATM in Montreal.
I got my money back but how did they get my card number and PIN?

See what happens when you go using that new fangled electronic technology. It's fraught with danger! :lol:
#1643484
Creating a magnetic stripe card is pretty simple - and you type in all the details required on any website that you want to pay something with.

The PIN is more complex but there are various known scams.

A PIN can be verified either directly by a bank (which is the norm for ATMs) but also by the chip built into a card. There has been reports on and off, of what is known as a "YesCard". Essentially, someone loads your account details into a custom chip which will authorise any PIN number. Apparently its a French speaking, Tunisian based group who are accused, although as far as I've heard the ringleader has not been caught https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/YesCard

Another option, is that at some stage you have used a compromised Chip and PIN machine. This has recorded all of your details (including PIN) allowing them to be copied and used by others. There is apparently a black market for this information, with the details bought world wide. Compromised machines look and work identically to normal ones so you would never know.
#1643587
These were credit cards that have never been in a cash machine - in fact I use Apple Pay whererver I can so no card details are transmitted. I can’t remember the last time that I put any of them in a card machine.

Two of the purchase attempt were on line & immediately declined. The other was in-store (Apple Pay) - also immediately declined.

All three attempted transactions generated calls / text messages, but no fraudulent transactions were mentioned, nor have I noticed any.

It is really odd - never happened to me before.
#1643613
Paul the difference between your experience and the others was that your attempts were genuine. Somehow you triggered an alert. Nothing to do with your card going into a reader or your pin being compromised. The banks are trying to protect themselves against your money being nicked.

I transferred from one bunch of robbing gits to another. The first time I tried to use my card it was frozen. Because the transaction didn’t match my usual spending pattern! It took me about a week to get it unlocked.
PaulB liked this
#1643641
I think that’s what has happened too.... what surprised me was that it involved an attempted purchase from a common high street retailer with 3 different cards, each with its own spending pattern, from 3 different banks, yet seemingly all triggered an alert within 10 minutes.

I guess that this is better than the alternatives.
#1643650
Egg used to freeze my credit card every month when I bought my rail season ticket. They considered train tickets to be a high fraud risk item (which is true) - but were completely unable to spot the pattern that I legitimately spent the same amount each month in the same railway station ..... I only stuck with them because the cashback was so good at the time.