Apropos of nothing #3: Fraud

A while back on one of the many webfora I peruse, someone posted this question: "Have any of you fallen for a scam?"

This was my response.

I almost got scammed once, to the tune of about $500 US.

I used to live in Kagoshima, Japan, and since it's out in the hind end of nowhere, if I wanted to buy anything invented in the 20th century I had to go to Kagoshima City.

One of the places I used to frequent there was the Kagoshima City branch of Tower Records. I wouldn't buy much there, because CDs and DVDs are insanely overpriced in Japan ($30 for a new-release CD? yaright). One rare occasion when I did buy something, I decided to use my credit card, 'cause I was a bit low on cash at that point in the month. They tried to swipe it through twice, but it didn't work. This didn't cause me to be suspicious, because there are CC readers in Japan that can't read U.S. cards due to different formatting.

That night, when I got home, NHK news was showing a feature about how there was a ring of credit card thieves working in Japan, surreptitiously switching store's CC readers with ones that had hidden transmitters that would send card info to someone w. a laptop hiding in the stairwell (usually). Again, this did not set off any alarm bells.

A few days later, I get the frantic e-mails from Citibank, along with the frantic phone calls from my parents. "Call us NOW. This is not a sales issue. There has been suspicious activity..."

Apparently, the swipe machine at Tower Records sent my CC info to the scammers, who then promptly put it on a fake credit card and tried to buy 60,000 yen worth of clothes with it. In Tokyo.

I had to explain to the nice Citibank lady that I was nowhere near Tokyo, and my card was still in my posession. This confused her because the records showed that a card was physically swiped at the store in Tokyo.

The thing that saved me from having to deal w. chargebacks, etc. was that at that time I was always riding very close to my limit with that card. On that particular day, I only had $50 of credit before I hit the limit, so the $500 charge was denied.

When the Citibank lady said that the thieves had tried to buy clothes, I had to point out that, as an average (big&tall, oh hell FAT) American, there was no way in hell that I could actually buy clothes in Japan. We laughed, and she fed-exed me a new card.