Foo - Anyone have unauthorized charges on their credit cards?

We just got our statement and there was some charges on it that wasn’t made by either my wife or me. We checked it out and it was charged against our Verizon Wireless account. We still don’t know what this was about and Verizon couldn’t give us an answer either other than they will credit us the amount charged. It started with a $26 dollar charge, then about 6 or 7 charges of $5.80.

Anyone else had their credit card hacked?

We just got our statement and there was some charges on it that wasn’t made by either my wife or me. We checked it out and it was charged against our Verizon Wireless account. We still don’t know what this was about and Verizon couldn’t give us an answer either other than they will credit us the amount charged. It started with a $26 dollar charge, then about 6 or 7 charges of $5.80.

Anyone else had their credit card hacked?
We had ours hacked once....Visa was really good about it. Whole amt was written off

We just got our statement and there was some charges on it that wasn’t made by either my wife or me. We checked it out and it was charged against our Verizon Wireless account. We still don’t know what this was about and Verizon couldn’t give us an answer either other than they will credit us the amount charged. It started with a $26 dollar charge, then about 6 or 7 charges of $5.80.

Anyone else had their credit card hacked?
was it from www.bikeroom.com??

ive had mine ripped off twice, once from a telecommunications company in australia for about $2000, and then from the scumbag at bikeroom for $450

You mean other than the charges my wife put on her card without my knowledge...

PM me your CC number, name and address and I will check it out for you!;)

Check your computer for spy/adware. Phishing is becoming real common nowadays and grabbing your keystrokes when you buy online, then transmitting the data to the hacker is really easy. They usually steal only $5-7 at a time so that no one notices anything strange. But repeat it 10-thousand times a month and it adds up to some serious change...

That sounds like what happened to me. We are thinking of changing our card number.

yep. on my mastercard someone in the bahammas charged $3,800.00, and then in upstate N.Y charged another $2,300 for a weeks stay at a posh bed-n-breakfast. I called the company credit card fraud line they discontinued the card and sent me a new one, no problem what so ever, at that time or now.
but they did ask me if I gave anyone permission to use the card or if I had been to any of those places.

A couple of years ago I got a call at three in the morning from AMEX security telling me that someone in Italy was trying to charge $4k+ on my card; had I authorized it? (Had I %^*%^%^%^!^*!!!!!) They stopped the card and gave me a new one within 24-hours.

There have been a couple of other times when unknown charges have appeared, and each time AMEX have had no qualms about cancelling the charge.

- Wil

The credit card companies are good about cancelling the charges. I just wonder how the heck they got the numbers.

It happened to me once. I had a charge on my checking account that I hadn't used in over 6 months. I called the bank (Bank of America) and told them. They said it was a recurring charge from a merchant that I authorized. I disputed it, and B of A said they weren't going to do anything about it. I called the company that charged it, and they reversed it. I then called B of A back, and they said it was reversed, but since the charge was for more than what was in my account, they were going to charge an NSF fee. After being on the phone for a while, I got a hold of a supervisor, told her where she could shove my account and had the account closed. I'll never bank with B of A again.

Anyone have unauthorized charges on their credit cards?

It happens to me every month. Usually about 80 % of the charges on there I didn't authorize.

Bummer, I called the fraud desk and they had to issue new cards to us. Stinking jerks! Danno, thanks for the tip on running the spyware program, I'll make sure I do that.

Bummer, I called the fraud desk and they had to issue new cards to us. Stinking jerks! Danno, thanks for the tip on running the spyware program, I'll make sure I do that.Spyware and antivirus. If you have an older antivirus program (one that came out more than a year ago), or if you're using some feeble freebie one like AVG, then uninstall your old/weak stuff. Slap on a 30-day trial of Kaspersky AntiVirus 6 (http://usa.kaspersky-labs.com/trials/trialsregHOME.php?aw=Trials+Page&ref=%2Fdownloads%2Ftrial-versions.php&chapter=146481750).

After installing it, you have a red K icon in your system tray. Right-click it and choose Update, and reboot if it says it needs a reboot.

Download this file: http://www.mechbgon.com/maxed-out.cfg Now right-click the red K, choose Settings, and click the Load button in the Protection panel. Have it load the maxed-out.cfg file, then right-click the K icon and choose Scan My Computer.

Once your 30-day Kaspersky trial is up, you can uninstall it and then use the "lite" free version of it: info on that (http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=240788) The full version includes rootkit detection, so start with the 30-day trial of the full version.



Other resources:

Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner (http://safety.live.com/site/en-US/default.htm) does a free spyware/virus scan. It also checks for open ports, Registry errors, useless junk files and other handy functions. :)

Spybot Search & Destroy (http://www.download.com/Spybot-Search-Destroy/3000-8022_4-10401314.html?tag=lst-0-1) is a popular free antispyware app with some immunization capability. Update it every week or two.

SpywareBlaster (http://www.download.com/SpywareBlaster/3000-8022_4-10486084.html?tag=lst-0-1) is another immunization app. Update it every week or two.

Windows Defender (http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx) is Microsoft's own free antispyware program and does real-time monitoring like an antivirus program does. Works on Windows XP with Service Pack 2. Keeps itself updated automagically. :)

Microsoft Update (http://update.microsoft.com) gets most Microsoft stuff up-to-date. If you have Office software such as Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Visio, etc, then also hit Office Update (http://g.msn.com/9SE/1?http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdate/default.aspx) to ensure your Office software is up-to-date.

mech's info on Limited accounts (http://www.mechbgon.com/build/Limited.html) Malware is preventible. This is one of the best places to start preventing it: don't go needlessly flyin' around with a Computer Administrator account when you're just doing daily-driver stuff like email, IM and web browsing.



Also, if you haven't got a software firewall running, I'd recommend you use one, even if you have a hardware firewall. On WinXP, you can start with the Windows Firewall. If it's something else, there's the free version of ZoneAlarm (http://www.zonelabs.com), for one. And if you are a FireFox user, update to version 2.0 (http://www.getfirefox.com), which has anti-phishing capabilities (phishing is another way the bad guys could get your info). Whether you actually use Internet Explorer yourself, I'd recommend getting IE7 installed if you have a WinXP system, since it has improved security including anti-phishing options.

Stolen credit card numbers are usually tested with "small purchases" so that the card owner may not notice them on their bill. Then they clean you out.

I've heard of Verizon doing this. Call them and find out what gives.

Gawd, I don't think there is a single good wireless company.

Alltel treats me like crap (literally every employee I've seen face-to-face save 2).
T-Mobile has reception issues.
Verizon charges oddly.
Sprint has a horrid customer service rapport with my family.
Cingular...not available in my city to my knowledge (Alltel land).

+1 to Mister not wanting to bank with BofA again. As soon as my debt is paid off, I'm switching.

By the way, veering onto the topic of spyware... it's annoying to run spyware scans and have them dredge up tracking cookies. Tracking cookies aren't a big deal, but you can do something about them anyway if they bug you.

For Internet Explorer, go to Control Panel > Internet Options. The Internet Options panel will open up. Click the Privacy tab and scoot the slider up to Medium-High, then click Apply.

Next, click the Advanced button there in the Privacy tab. Check the checkbox for Override automatic cookie handling. Have it block all third-party cookies. That's pretty much the end of tracking cookies in IE, although you can still immunize against them with SpywareBlaster too (recommended, since SB also does other beneficial stuff). Some of these changes are on a per-user basis, so do them from each user account if you have multiple user accounts on your computer.

In FireFox prior to versions 2.0, there was a checkbox to allow blocking all third-party cookies too. It looks like they took that option out of FF 2.0, but SpywareBlaster can still block a bunch of tracking cookies in FireFox for you. On FireFox, I believe this also is a per-user setting, so if your computer has multiple user accounts, immunize from within each of them.

Again, tracking cookies aren't the end of the world, so that's just info on how you'd deter them if they bugged you. I haven't seen any negative functional impact from making these changes.

It happened to me once. I had a charge on my checking account that I hadn't used in over 6 months. I called the bank (Bank of America) and told them. They said it was a recurring charge from a merchant that I authorized. I disputed it, and B of A said they weren't going to do anything about it. I called the company that charged it, and they reversed it. I then called B of A back, and they said it was reversed, but since the charge was for more than what was in my account, they were going to charge an NSF fee. After being on the phone for a while, I got a hold of a supervisor, told her where she could shove my account and had the account closed. I'll never bank with B of A again.
Yap, I had one of those too. Not with B of A but with another bank. Turns out that a store in New Jersey where I bought something 3 years earlier was charging a service plan, but only every now and then. I would get is resolved and then a month later there it was again. I had to cancel the card and then I started getting notices in the mail. Then come to find out it, the company went out of business and it was a scavenger company collecting on the original companies dept and also charging for the service contracts active of not. It was a huge mess. But ended up costing me nothing.