The whinge thread

[LAT]

Oh no! That's not nice!

It happened to my daughter recently but the bank were brilliant about it, stopped the card and refunded the money straight away and sent a new card out the following day I think.

Any idea how it happened?

[tricia]

You should be able to get that refunded Giraffe - Have you contacted your Branch

Tricia

[giraffe]

The bank contacted me, and I didn't believe who they were, and told them to write to me. So I phoned the bank myself to check and they said did I spend £150 at a steak house yesterday? Or top up my vodaphone mobile three times (I'm not with vodaphone) , or spend £95 at a butcher's, or go to an Indian takeaway yesterday (Yuk)? etc.

So I said the only thing I had spent was £7.50 on a ticket for a concert F is in. All these dodgy transactions were after the theatre ticket, so it looks like the theatre's chip and pin machine might be compromised. I hardly use that account, except for the weekly food shopping, which was how they spotted it so quickly. A couple of non ASDA items a month would be unusual, but all that lot had alarm bells ringing.

They said they'll send me a new card, and refund the items, but it's a bit of a worry and I'll have to check my statement extra thoroughly.

[LAT]

Seems like your bank are on the ball too. I have heard that sometimes cards are cloned and then they lie low for a while before using it so it could even have been somewhere you used it a few months ago.

[kathlyn]

Nasty thing to happen but at least your bank is dealing with it. It made me check my bank account statement, which came today, as I had used my debit card over the phone the other day.

[gill216]

I had a similar experience with my credit card. Its for emergencies/ big purchases only so when a mobile top up for a phone company I wasn't with appeared then I spotted it straight away. The bank actually knew where it had happened. Leicester services. That month I'd used it for petrol several times just to see how much petrol I used wandering around London for a week. I didn't get it back quickly- eventually would be the word. And in the meantime they kept stacking interest on the £30 fraud which I wasn't prepared to pay. Eventually I got all of the excess charges and interest refunded too.

A friend didn't know her card had been used until the police knocked on her door and asked her if she'd shopped in Iceland, Mothercare, Curry's etc. In a week she'd had big time purchases on her card. The police waited for the next transaction, which happened to be tesco online. They went in as delivery men to the girl who'd cloned her card and I'm very happy to say she was well and truly got.

[giraffe]

The only previous time I had a problem was when I was about 20. I put petrol in my grandad's car and it came to about £8 (You can tell it was a long time ago ) and when the bill came there was £18 for petrol. It was in the days of those slidey machines that take a rubbing of your card and the amount was written in by hand. After I had signed it he had written a 1 in front of the amount. To add insult to injury I had stopped at that garage and not the next one because it was a small chain and I was friends with the owner of the chain's daughter. That took months to get the charges and so on refunded, even though my copy of the receipt clearly had the right amount on it.

[clvrlad]

and this is why i use a prepay credit card rather than one linked to an account
i put on what im going to spend when im going to spend it....
all of my online transactions use it and my offlines ones usually use cash

[Bunnylump]

Well, at least it looks like they're sorting it. The thing to watch out for is any phone calls - always ring THEM back (like you did).

[giraffe]

I was quite abrupt to the man the first time I spoke to him. It didn't help that he had a strong foreign accent and couldn't pronounce my name. I've had several calls lately trying to do a lifestyle survey and they all sounded foreign and got short shrift. (I have nothing against foreign people, but I have a real problem with people who cold call, and I object to firms that use overseas call centres).

[gill216]

Me too. I hate it more when they say "My names Steve, Mike" or whatever and "I'm calling from XY or Z" . I always respond with (if I have the time) "Thats not your name- what's the real one - and you might be from that company but which country are you in at the moment and how's your weather? I keep them chatting for ages about nothing, I ask loads of cultural questions without letting them get a word in edgeways and then say- "Sorry I have to go now- nice talking to you- but dont call again because I'm buying nothing and this call will hopefully have cost your company a mint for no good reason- but I did enjoy talking to you personally."

[giraffe]

I always just tell them that I don't deal with whatever it is over the phone, and if they write to me I'll look at it. The one today seemed to have a real problem understanding what a letter was, and just kept saying "I'm from Barclays fraud department" and I just said "well if you are you can write to me then". Then when I phoned the bank it was one of those machine voices that asked for my card number and when I typed it in it didn't like it (because the card was stopped) and then asked for my telephone banking code. I don't bank over the phone so I didn't have one of those and I just kept holding while it asked over and over for the code and then a person appeared on the line. Then the woman asked me what direct debits I have, as a security question, and I couldn't think what she was talking about because there are no DDs on the account (trick question to see if I was for real )

[Laura]

I have just spent 4 hours installing updates, then re-installing Norton, because the updates somehow wiped it out, then reinstalling the original updates because they didn't work, and now my computer has decided it needs to do some more. I WANT TO GO TO BED!!!!!!!

[Bunnylump]

It was installing latest updates of Norton that killed my computer last time. (Well, that coupled with the giant, real live computer bug).

[MBH]

(Well, that coupled with the giant, real live computer bug).

Did you catch it? Can I see????

[gill216]

We may a couple of residents here who can recommend free antivirus and malaware packages. I followed the advice fo rmore than a year and never had a problem. I hate Norton and Mcafee.

I'm just wondering should I still be running both packages even though I now have free things from Virgin media? I don't want to say what those freebies were then because there may be something else on the recommendation list now.

[Bunnylump]

It's ok now. But we had to take the computer to my friend Brian (computer whizz) who took dodgy stuff out and added in new, magic fairy dust or whatever it is you put in computers.

And yes, MBH, there REALLY was a big beetle in it. We get storm beetles coming down our chimney. One had got into the computer and fried...

[LAT]

I use AVG free antivirus. I've been pretty happy with it so far.

[MBH]

I use AVG free antivirus. I've been pretty happy with it so far.

Likewise... My OH did manage to click one 'poison link' a year or so back that needed 'engineer intervention', but AVG works fine for me.

From wiki.answers, so probably not 100% proof, but this is the gist of a story I've always known:

The first documented "bug" in a computer was a badly hammered moth caught in the relay contacts of the electromechanical Harvard Mark II computer. It had gotten into the relay and was pounded to death as the contacts kept trying to close for hours as the engineers tried to locate the problem. It was immediately taped in to the logbook and is still there.


Unfortunately the term "bug" for a technical problem does not originate here, it has been traced back to the 1870s and it is unknown if any actual insects were involved there.

[Scurra]

Well, I have to confess that I don't use any anti-virus software at all here. At least not "permanently running" ones. I run a scan every so often, but given how much security is built into things nowadays, and as long as you actually do the security updates on your Operating System and Browser when they tell you to, it's very hard to catch anything by accident.

Now deliberately chosing to download and install a piece of software you know nothing about from a source you have never heard of... well, that's a whole different story.