A small charge, an amount under a dollar up to a few dollars, appears on your credit card statement.  Due to the insignificance of the amount, you don;t bother spending any time trying to figure out what it was for, and having it reversed off your account.  You try and recall where the charge could have come from, perhaps an adjustment to a legitimate purchase.

I never thought much about thieves stealing million of credit card accounts, and simply charging a few dollars to each stolen account.  But as it turns out, that’s exactly what they do, and a few dollars charged to millions of accounts, results in millions of dollars.

I went home that night and checked my credit card statements, and sure enough, I found these insignificant charges on my account.  The total of them do not warrant my doing anything about it, but they are there.  I’ll bet if you look, you’ll find them on yours as well.

Here’s the link to an article where the FTC just busted a very organized ring was stealing credit card accounts and doing this very scheme.

Time and again I have posted regarding the use of a credit card over a debit card.  The main issue is that with your debit card, when fraudulent access is gained to your account, your funds are gone.

I found this article tonight that does a great job highlighting some of the issues occurring with debit and credit cards, and identifies ten (10) contexts where the use of your debit card would likely prove to be a real issue for you.

Here it the link to the article.  You may have to paste it into your browser.

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/109125/10-places-not-to-use-your-debit-card?mod=bb-checking_savings

Today, for instance, I received a booklet of courtesy checks at my home.  These courtesy checks are linked to a corporate credit card I maintain for my firm.  All the information regarding the account pertains to the business: firm name, address, phone number… My monthly statements go directly to the firm address, as does all communications regarding the account – rightfully so – that’s the way I set up the corporate account.

So why then would this well-known, highly publicized card issuer send unsolicited courtesy checks to my personal residence that were prepared using my name (not the firm’s name) and my personal residence address (not the firm’s address) to be drawn against my account, when I would not be expecting such checks???

A few years back we had an experience with bank fraud.  In closing a relative’s estate a savings account was opened to accumulate any funds for estate purposes.  No checks were requested or issued, and no debit card was requested.  Simply a bank account to accumulate any funds until the estate was distributed.  So how surprised were we when we received a call from the fraud unit of the bank alerting us to potentially fraudulent activity on the account using a debit card???  Turns out the bank on it’s own accord issued a debit card on the savings account, and sent it to an old address used more than twenty years ago.  The current residents of that address received a windfall when the debit card arrived out of the blue in their mail – unbeknown to us.

Seems to me that although the credit card companies complain they fall victim to fraudulent activity and suffer the losses, their own actions in some part (perhaps a large part) contribute to fraud and could have been prevented if they simply stopped sending out unsolicited information (or worse courtesy checks) to cardholders not expecting the materials.

It is well known that purchasing gas is one of the first things someone does with a stolen or fraudulent card, because typically there are no cameras and human intervention over the use of the card.  It either works at the pump to buy gas, or it doesn’t.  If it works, a minimal amount is purchased, and then the card is used for the real fraudulent purchases.

Skimming moved into the world of gas pumps, and appeared in articles as far back as 2008.  Identity and credit thieves attach card capturing devices into gas pumps, capturing each customer’s credit or debit card information, and transmit the card information via wireless/cellular to a nearby conspirator receiving the information on their cell phone – each customer unaware their card has been jeopardized, as the devices are installed inside the pumps.

Skimming has become so sophisticated that card information is available to the thieves almost instantaneously to their unlawful skimming, commonly transmitted to a nearby cell phone.

In a recent ad I noticed yesterday, Apple’s iPhones now have an app available to swipe, capture and charge credit or debit cards right through the iPhone.

Provided it hasn’t already been discovered and used, it’s just a matter of time that the thieves will migrate to this technology, capturing the unsuspecting customer’s card information via a swipe on their iPhone, and simply press the send button to transmit the stolen information to their co-conspirator making up fraudulent cards using customer information.

Isn’t technology just wonderful?