Jacq was called yesterday by Natwest who told her that her bank card had been cloned. So that’s the second card of hers which has probably been skimmed. That account is therefore out of reach as new cards are issued and she contacted Barclaycard to get those details changed as a precaution. How to get fast help in such cases? Say “My card has been skimmed” and they don’t mess you about - send you straight to the fraud dept. Apparently Barclaycard have some monitoring checks you can use so J is doing those now. And she already uses Credit Expert to keep an eye on potential issues that way.
She had a call last week from Barclaycard about “unusual activity’. When she asked where she was told iTunes. Turns out my grandiose spending of 59p and £1.79 here and there had set off the alarms. Yet when I buy the shopping on it, an xbox on it and other stuff all in one day or buy online they couldn’t care. And I’d been using the card at iTunes since I got the Touch (and no music. I refuse to buy music from a computer company). I’m sure they’ll say someone could be testing the card for approval.
They say you are fully protected against this sort of thing. But given that you would no doubt have to prove you were not in certain places, given that you would have to do without money until they satisfied themselves and this would be no short process, and also given that we must all surely know by now that bankers are thieves in it only for themselves then I don’t want to be at the sharp end of finding out.
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I think the reason they phone over small amounts is because that’s what a lot of scammers use to make money. I know my old fella had a few transactions of 50p here and there on his card that he had not done, and it’s because the fraudsters take a little here and there from thousands of cards, and it adds up
Have you seen the Barclaycard advert where the guys is sliding down a water slide and he uses his card as he zooms past certain points. Good advert, not so good if someone walks past you in the street with a card reader and scans your card…
Transactions under £10 go through without you having to enter a PIN number, so all Mr Scammer has to do is set up his scanner for a £9.99 transaction and walk around crowded places for a few hours :-)
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