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  • This is just a heads-up for everybody to take a hard look at their credit card statements.

    It may be a coincidence, but somebody used my credit card during the weekend to purchase an account with LiveChat http://www.livechatinc.com/ which is a chat application for websites.

    I discovered the charge within a couple of days, and the company immediately refunded the $367 without any question but they are refusing to give me any information as to who this might be, other than to say it was "someone else", not me.

    I've never heard of this outfit before, I can't conceive of any case where I would have been interested in a non-open source solution, and even if I had ever checked them out their free trial doesn't need a credit card, so they would not have had my number anyway.

    I'm really angry that they won't give any more information, as now that leaves everybody I've been in contact with or worked with who could have gotten their hands on my card under suspicion, and of course the timing couldn't have been worse if it is just a coincidence.
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    • Problem solved. They finally told me that it was a know fraudulent Chinese site that did this, which they now have banned, so the timing is just a coincidence. It could have been from any number of online sites I've ordered from that got hacked.
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        • 46886
        • 1,154 Posts
        Yeah I was going to say probably coincidence. Our brains are great at putting stuff together, adding up things and making some sense of them all together, but many times reality is just a huge number of random things going on.
        • It was just a really weird coincidence, as I've been using credit cards online for at least 10 years and this was the first time I've had this happen. It looks like one of the online shops I use got hacked and they probably don't even know it. I'm trying to think who keeps my credit card info. I don't allow that in very many places.
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            • 46886
            • 1,154 Posts
            There really need to be some privacy laws about these things. There is every reason (and even legal obligations sometimes) for companies to keep the info, but then that personal info is hackable. It could be a company you bought from a decade ago.

            So there should be limitations on how long or behind what level of security personal info can be kept. But, with a background of insecure Windows machines, security is already deeply compromised.
            • There are very strict laws about that, see https://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/pci-faqs-2/ but of course not every online shop is compliant.

              That's why a few years ago I got a pre-paid debit card from the post office, and cancelled my bank cards. I've only had two occasions when it was refused, and in one case the merchant made changes to his payment gateway to accept it.

              So I only put that kind of cash into it if I'm going to be using it. I usually only have $20 or so on it in case I see a book or knitting pattern I want. Since I was traveling, I put some extra into it in case I needed it for something. And of course that's when they were able to hit it for that much. So really, there's no way to know if they've been trying it for a long time, and I just never had enough on it.
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                • 3749
                • 24,544 Posts
                I just noticed a weird pair of charges for Home Box Office on my credit card when I got home from a vacation. I have HBO, but through a DirectTV account, so I would never get a charge directly from Home Box Office unless I ordered something from them (which I never do). The charges occurred while I was in Hawaii, which turned out to be a coincidence, but made me more suspicious.

                It took about an hour on the phone with DirecTV, HBO, and the credit card company to sort things out. DirectTV sent me to HBO. HBO said the charges were not on my account. The CC company also said, at first, that the charges were not listed. Eventually, we figured out that I had rented a surfboard (twice) from a place called "Star Beach Boys." When I downloaded the transactions into Quicken, Quicken asked me if it was OK to rename the payee, and being exhausted from a whole day of travel, I said yes without noticing that it was inexplicably renaming the payee to "Home Box Office."

                So -- false alarm. Maybe someday I'm going to learn not to do important work when I'm exhausted, though probably not. wink
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                  • 14877
                  • 110 Posts
                  Quote from: BobRay at Sep 30, 2014, 04:27 AM
                  [...]

                  So -- false alarm. Maybe someday I'm going to learn not to do important work when I'm exhausted, though probably not. wink

                  On the otherhand, through my career, I generally found that I got exhausted because I was doing important work and couldn't bring myself to stop (eat, sleep...) before finishing what I was working on!
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