I shop at Hackeet.com in London
At least that’s what VISA told me last week. Apparently I purchased $370 worth of clothing at 4am Eastern Time one morning last week. A few hours later my phone rang and I received an automated message from VISA’s fraud prevention department. The message listed two suspicious transactions – one of them was legit and the other one caught me by surprise.
Somebody had used my credit card information to place an order for men’s clothing at www.hackeet.com. It was the first time I even heard about them, which cemented the fact that I did not place the order.
I called VISA right away and asked for more details about this particular order. The customer service rep was only able to tell me the exact time of purchase, the place and the amount, but nothing else. When I told him that I did not place the order, he pushed the red button immediately and the card was invalid from that point on.
It seems we caught the fraudulent order early enough, because I never saw the charge hit my account.
Those of you who know me, know also how careful I am with online purchases and using my credit card in general. I have no freaking idea how my card details were leaked and I have to assume that one of the places that has my card on file, had a leak that gave the fraudsters access to my details.
Now I’m on a crusade to figure out the source of the leak. My first step is to get in touch with Hackeet in London and see if we can get more details about the order that was placed on my behalf. I want to get the billing and shipping address that was provided for this order. Perhaps that gives me a clue where to start looking for the bastards. If you have any other ideas, please let me know.
July 8th, 2010 at 10:09 am
I had a fraudulent charge on one of my cards a year or so ago. $500 of ‘vacuum cleaner supplies’ in Texas. It was a one-off screwup … one of those old manual carbon-copy card registers. Someone (or a machine) read the wrong numbers and charged my card without verifying against my name or other account specs.
Not saying this is what happened, just offering another information point. Asking Heckeet how they process orders might shine some light. There are some pretty crappy ecommerce setups out there.
July 8th, 2010 at 10:18 am
What about police? Do you plan to send them a notice?
July 8th, 2010 at 10:30 am
@garret: Thanks. It was an online purchase and not one of the crappy carbon-copy registers. I went to Hackeet’s site myself, registered and went through an order process (without the final submit). Everything looked like any other online purchasing system: mailing address, billing address and even CVV2. I’m certain that some other vendor that I had purchased from in the past had a leak.
@Serhii: I talked to VISA about this and they said they would not start an investigation if there was no money-loss (on their end or my end). The charge never appeared in my account. On top of that the service rep mentioned that there are 100s-1000s of similar cases a day and that the amount would be written off instead of starting an investigation.
July 12th, 2010 at 7:21 am
Hi Bro,
I know this does not solve your problem but it is actually a quite good service from MasterCard (Lufthansa Frequent Traveller Card). I get notified by SMS everytime an amount >50$ (I can adjust the amount) is booked with that card which allows more or less instantaneous reaction.
April 25th, 2011 at 9:42 am
[...] made between 4/20 and 4/24. The only problem is: I was here in Santa Fe.Less than a year since the last incident, my Debit/VISA card was again compromised and used in all the locations above. This time the damage [...]