Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Chase Debit Card Fraud

Posted in Hacking, Law, Life by Elliott Back on April 4th, 2007.

A few “interesting” transactions showed up on my debit card in the last few days, but they’re not mine:

Pending POS DEBIT OXFORD INDUSTRIES INC SAN DIEGO CA $12.21
04/03/2007 LOWE’S #464 WINCHESTER K 04/01LOWE’S #4 $759.15
04/02/2007 WAL-MART #0702 WINCHESTE 03/31WAL-MART $1,232.59

Yes, for a grand total of $2,012.95 there were a series of transactions over the last two days on my checking account. I didn’t notice at first because I was in the middle of paying bills, which is a $2,000 to $4,000 process (rent, utilities, credit card over the last month, student loans, etc), but then I thought the account balance appeared lower than normal so I logged on and found these.

The kind of debit card fraud is interesting. This isn’t a “got your number” somewhere fraud, it’s credit card cloning. Someone actually walked into a store with some kind of copy of my card and pin, and bought stuff. POS (Point of sale) debit indicates that.

Update: I received my refund today (4/11/2007) just one week later. That’s fast!

Update 2: There are all kinds of credit card schemes every day, but it might have been this NYC restaurant scam which snared me. I’ll never know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 8:46 am and is tagged with debit card fraud, oxford industries inc, wincheste, lowe s, card cloning, nyc restaurant, wal mart, san diego ca, account balance, grand total, student loans, point of sale, checking account, winchester, chase, few days, credit card schemes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

5 Responses to “Chase Debit Card Fraud”

  1. Carmelo Lisciotto says:

    Wow that is interesting…. the things people will do…

    Carmelo Lisciotto

  2. Kevin says:

    Nice to hear you got a refund so quickly. It sucks this kind of thing happens but it is usually made worse when you either don’t get your money back or it takes months.

  3. Scott says:

    A similar thing happened to my son however WAMU determined the ‘fraud’ was authorized (they believe he gave his PIN away — which he didn’t). So his claim for fraud has been denied … what a mess.

    The scam in his case is that bad checks were deposited at an ATM into his account (in the realm of $2000) then withdrawls (from $500 to $1500) were made at some Walmart stores. He was taken for over $8000.

  4. Steve Laz says:

    I just had the same thing happen to me, cleaned out what little I had in my Chase account. I am waiting for them to send me the forms to dispute the charges. What did you do to get your return so quickly?

  5. Richard says:

    Yeah, Steve,it’s going viral. I live in Houston and don’t keep very much in my checking account. Yesterday I found these two charges on my Chase bank account:

    Pending Misc. Debit POS DEBIT TOYS’R'US 707 UTRECHT NL $1,368.38 (that’s in the Netherlands)

    Pending Misc. Debit POS DEBIT KEAN UNIVERSITY WEB UNION NJ $5.81

    The $5.81 charge was probably a test to see if the card or number worked.

    I wish that I could wait for several days to get this cleared up, but I will be seriously overdrawn Monday morning. I have contacted my bank and Toy’s R Us (who were NO help whatsoever)

    I have been told that they have cloned my card, with real plastic and maybe even my pin, although I don’t know how they would have gotten that.

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