It all started one of the mornings for me. The bank sent me a strange TXT message asking me to confirm a transaction for $0.73 on my credit card. I couldn't be sure that TXT was from the bank so logged into my online banking and lo and behold I see pending transactions that should not have been there. Now I got suspicious.

The transactions appeared to come from PayPal and have the following description.



So I decided to check my PayPal account. No transactions there. I did a bit of searching online for the transaction description, there seemed to be quite a bit of confusion around it. Mostly the comments for the similar transactions were along the lines of 'I am seeing transactions from PayPal on my credit card that were never made', some people didn't even have PayPal accounts!

Now I knew something was up. I responded to the bank's TXT choosing the 'do not authorise' option and got a call back from the Credit Card Fraud hotline immediately.

Unfortunately all operators were busy at the time and I couldn't get through. I waited until that evening and was finally able to talk to someone. The operator was very friendly and informed me that by that point I had up to a dozen of unauthorised transactions in the amounts ranging from $0.73 to $10 or so. All of these were coming from US websites. Since I haven't been using my credit card that day, none of these were legitimate. Needless to say, my credit card number got cancelled immediately and a new card reissued.

So if you start to see strange transactions on your credit card, call your bank as you've probably fallen a victim of credit card fraud too.



-i