Unauthorized Charges Gone Wild on Me

posted by Bob Lawless
When you study credit cards and all the bad stuff that can happen with credit cards, you don't expect it to happen to you. I also suppose that is true for everyone. Recently, we had our own little brush with credit card fraud. It all began when my wife called me at my office and asked, "Is there something you want to tell me?" A package of videos from Girls Gone Wild had shown up on our doorstep and was addressed to "R Lawless."

To convince my spouse that I had no idea why these videos had come to our house, my first instinct was to ask whether she thought I was stupid enough to place such an order and have it delivered to the house. Then, I remembered my courtroom advocacy training where I was taught never to ask a question to which I did not know the answer. We immediately checked our credit card records, and we found a number of other unauthorized charges for things like Netflix, Blockbuster.com, a magazine subscription, and a subscription to a Scholastic book series. We could not figure out what sort of fraudster was stupid enough to use our credit card to sign us up for subscriptions that get sent to our house. A little Internet research found the answer.

All of these companies have offers that give bonus prizes or services to a person who gets others to subscribe. Someone had used our credit card number to generate phony subscriptions that would qualify them for these bonuses. Presumably, it is more difficult to trace the person who originated such a fraud because the goods that were ordered ended up at our addresses instead of the fraudster's address. When we called the credit card company to report the fraud, the customer service rep said that they were seeing a lot of this sort of fraud recently.

In addition to canceling our credit card account, we pulled a copy of our credit report and have been closely monitoring all of our credit accounts. For the most part, the companies who had wrongfully charged us were pretty reasonable, the least they can do given that they have a business model that enables this sort of fraud. When told by my wife that we had received merchandise we had not ordered, the Girls Gone Wild rep had a little bit of "Are you sure you didn't order this" attitude but did eventually reverse the charges. It was also a little annoying that Netflix had authorized two accounts for the same postal address, certainly a situation that merits investigation.
http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2008/06/unauthorized-ch.html#more