Wheeling into fraud

When I got home last night I decided to put together one of the presents I got for Cindy for her birthday, a glider/rocker chair.  Cindy had said she would put it together herself but I figured I would do it for her while she was teaching a class so she could jump straight to enjoying it.  The assembly looked worse up front than what it turned out to be in reality, despite pretty sparse instructions.  It made me smile when I came back from my EUC ride and saw Cindy out on the lanai rocking in her new chair while watching the chickens.

So last night I finally decided to pull the trigger on buying my touring electric unicycle, a Msuper V3.  The wheel has a large 18 inch tire with power, speed and range capability that is damn close to double what my Ninebot One E+ has under the hood.  It is a beast.  I decided to buy the wheel from SpeedyFeet, a company over in the UK run by a guy that I really like from his YouTube videos.

So I hop on his site and place the order.  As soon as I try to complete the order I get a payment error.  I waited a few minutes and tried again, same deal.  I immediately assumed it was my CC company flagging the transaction as suspicious since it is overseas. I logged into my Chase account to see if I could authorize the transaction easily but didn’t see a way to do so.  I decided to just use Paypal instead to complete the order.  The wheel probably won’t show up for a couple weeks so I will have a lot of time to build up anticipation.

So this morning I wake up and see an email from Chase regarding card activity as I expected.  I figured I would just call them when I got to work and say false alarm, it was me.  So I make the call and am surprised the transaction they first ask me about is not SpeedyFeet, it is Sunshine Grocery Store for $275.  Huh, excuse me?  I had never heard of the store.  When the rep looked at the transaction he said it was in Naples.  I quickly looked online and saw the store was the shitty market about five miles from me at the corner of Wilson and Golden Gate Blvd.

After confirming with Cindy she didn’t for some reason go on a wild spending spree there, I logged into my account to look at all the recent activity.  I was not pleased.  There was a second visit to Sunshine as well as another local small supermarket as well as over $400 of charges at two local gas stations.  To round things out there were two Amazon transactions that I did not make.  In total, somewhere around $700 had been thrown on my card fraudulently since Friday.

So I started going over the transactions with the Chase rep, indicating what I did and did not charge.  I told him that it looked like most of these were in person transactions.  I said I have my card on me, how would they be doing over the counter transactions.  He said all of these transactions were via magnetic swipes, not using the chip that is part of the EMV cards.  The roll out of EMV tech seems totally half baked if so many retailers, including ALL gas stations still only accept the magnetic strip swipe for payment.  My assumption is that either Cindy or I swiped our card at a gas station that has a card skimmer.  Cindy did get gas at one station she never normally uses in the past week so that is the number one suspect on the list.

So after identifying the fraudulent transactions the rep said my card was frozen/cancelled and that I would be getting a brand new one with a new account in the mail shortly which will end this asshole’s joy ride.  Of course my frustration ride is just beginning as I now have to update the dozens of places that I regularly use that card as a payment source for.  The most frustrating thing is these skimmer criminals basically get a free pass.  If they are able to install the skimmer without being detected they are free to steal card info as they see fit since credit card companies make zero effort to prosecute them.

Nailing these people would take nothing more than a basic investigation in many cases.  You have the exact time the transaction came across the counter.  Pretty much any retailer has a security camera pointed at the counter.  Match the transaction to the video and BAM, there is your bad guy/girl. Because of the scale of credit card fraud banks have decided this is basically just a cost of doing business and write it off.  As long as that environment exists the scammers will continue to run rampant.

Even if EMV chips were fully implemented, RFID readers would be able to accomplish the same sort of deception.  It just doesn’t seem right that the guy shoplifting a few steaks will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law but the credit card thief that steals thousands of dollars of merchandise from countless individuals is not even pursued.