Credit Card Information You Need to Know

If you need justification for checking your credit card statement, this would be a good one. How about an online scam running for four years, debiting accounts, 1.35 million of them, by as little as $0.25 at a time. The debits were put into the accounts of bogus merchants set up by the scammers aided by unsuspecting mules throughout the U.S.

According to the FTC, the source of the stolen cards in unknown but I would be willing to bet that at least a good part of them came from the ongoing credit and debit card data breaches perpetrated by Albert Gonzalez and his bunch. After all, he god 170 million card accounts.

Out of the 1.35 Million consumers bilked out of these small sums, only 78,724 theft were reported. This pretty much convinces me that a lot of you folks aren’t checking your credit card statements like you should be. Every statement. Every month. Every time.

You read about it almost every day. You see it on Television. You even get warnings on your statements. But apparently you aren’t doing it.

Don’t think for a minute that it can’t happen to you. It can. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will. I promise. Those 170 million card numbers that the Gonzalez gang got is two-thirds of the population of the Unites States. Those card numbers did not go to jail with Gonzalez. They are still out there in the hands of the fraudsters. And there are a lot more bad guys out there still hard at work to steal your money.

Source:
Computerworld article

If you get a large number of telephone calls that mean nothing, it probably means that your bank account is under attack. The calls would be numerous short duration calls consisting of dead air (nothing on the other end), an innocuous recorded message, advertisement, or a telephone sex menu. The bad guys are blocking the bank from verifying a change in your information and they are attempting to take over your account.

If you have received these calls – or receive them in the future – immediately call the banks that you do business with and then report it to the IC3 webisite.

SOURCE: http://www.fbi.gov/cyberinvest/escams.htm