RE: Credit Card Fraud

Things like this are all too common these days, and it seems that AOL is the usual first false charge. I wonder if this is really a matter of stealing card information, or rather if the card numbers are being randomly generated by a number generator or something? You would think there would be more protection for things like this, but social engineering is tough to protect against.

My wife was hit by credit card fraud last week - somehow, someone managed to get her credit card number and used it to make charges to

  • AOL - setting up an email account in my wife's name that even used our actual address, phone number etc.

After a call to the credit card company, my wife's card was quickly blocked and the illegal charges were refunded to us, but despite the fact that we did not lose any money, things like this do make you wonder how secure credit cards really are, especially when used on-line.

[Via Luke Hutteman]

1 Comment

  • I would think that would really press the issue for single-use credit card numbers. A few companies already offer them. (AMEX is the one that comes to mind). The bad part about that is it gets people paranoid about using their CC online, even though that's probably the safest place it could be used!

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