Credit card fraud close to home.

[Wayne]

There have been two times when I've seen people experience credit card fraud personally. The first was many years ago when my oldest friend found that hundreds of pounds had been taken from his account. It took a while, but he got it sorted. In the meantime I tried to help out by giving him all the money I had on me at the time to at least make sure he wouldn't starve. The second time was a few days ago and it happened to one of our sons. Here's what happened:

It's 2am and I'm crashed out watching TV. Son comes into the room distressed and shows me his mobile banking app, which shows that 8 transactions have taken place on his account he had no idea about. 6 of these are for an online game store. Now, he has a PS5 but it's set up on my account due to him using my old PS4 to play the games he loves before upgrading to the PS5 and copying all the setting/games/etc. to that. He uses the account, but all payments go through my bank account rather than his. The reason for saying this is to show that there's no way that he could have ordered any games and have the payment come from his bank account. Six of them are for a game company, all for the exact same price and all on the same day. The other two were for some weird company I'd never heard of before.

So remember, it's 2am and I'm looking at his bank's fraud department to contact them. They have a 24/7 hotline so we give them a ring, go through all the security checks and speak to a very friendly lady who explains the payments are still "pending" and there's nothing they can do until they actually go out of the account. She explains that this may take up to 2 days, and to call them as soon as they go through. He's worried that a direct debit he has set up and due to go out the next day will fail, but she reassures him that when this happens companies will usually simply try again in a few days.

Two days later the payments have gone through. We call the bank again and this time speak to a man who's not as friendly as the lady we spoke to before, but still friendly. We explain the situation and how we were told that we'd need to wait until the payments had gone through before they could do anything. He checks with us which ones they were, asks if he's given his card to anyone else/if he's got his PIN written anywhere/does anyone else know his PIN/does he live with anyone else and then asks if there are any other transactions he doesn't recognise. We answer the questions and then says they can investigate it and they'll refund the money while it's being done. This is going to take up to 24 hours, but that's fine. Son now knows he's getting the money back and there'll be sufficient funds to cover his bills. Less than 24 hours later the money has gone back into his account, so it took about 3 days all in from him spotting the fraud to being reimbursed. Here's where it gets funny though, and I don't mean in a bad way. Two days later the postman comes and our son has some letters from the bank. One talks about about the fraud investigation and another eight, each responding to one of the fraudulent transfers so he has NINE letters!

From remembering when my friend got scammed and how many hoops he had to jump through to get that sorted, I can say that banks seem to be moving a lot faster these days and are a lot more understanding of how to deal with people who have been defrauded. Both have their accounts with the same bank, so it's not a matter of one lot being better than the other. It'll be interesting to see if this trend continues. The only question I really have (and I wish I'd asked them at the time) was why the payments have to go through before they can do anything about it. It may only be an extra 2 days, but it could mean the difference between being able to pay for gas and electricity or not. Worth thinking about.