argus

Went by Publix Saturday afternoon to pick up a few items …and at the checkout, the cashier informed me, somewhat sheepishly, that my Discover card was rejected. Hmm. “Well,” I think, “I did make a somewhat-out-of-the-ordinary purchase from Dell on Friday… but not cool.” Resolving to check into it upon arriving back home, I whip out the Visa and all is made right.

Of course, I promptly got distracted when I got home (Nichole and I parked it in front of a movie), so I had completely forgotten about it when we left to meet Preble for some grub at the ever-delicious Folks. Dinner was fine, simply fine, and when the bill arrived I pulled out my favorite star-spangled plastic to even up my debt with the house. This time, the cashier/waitress not only returns with a sheepish look on her face, but she brings me a slip of paper from the card-receipt machine: “Transaction rejected”, or something similar. Very not cool — although it is abstractly entertaining how the cashiers always seem embarrassed by some clod’s card getting rejected. Now doubly embarrassed (once over just for it having happened at all, twice over for realizing that I forgot to check on it earlier in the day), we beeline straight home to talk to the friendly people at 1-800-DISCOVER and find out “WTF”, as the kids say. I had some theories about what was up, chief among them that the aforementioned Dell purchase had flagged the Discover account monitors that something was amiss in my charge habits and to put things on immediate hold (I have notified them of an identity theft attempt in the past, so they’re pretty quick on the trigger with my account now). Thing is, had that been the case, the standard protocol — as has happened previously — is for them to call me and verify that the offending transaction is indeed legit …and of course there had been no such phone call. Other than that possibility, I had no idea what might be going down.

Talking to a friendly “account executive” cleared things up, and the truth was something I hadn’t heard of before. Apparently, a “verification request” was made on my card number, most likely over the Internet. This sort of thing is no big deal, as it’s the first half of every transaction that I use my card for. In this case though, the second half — the charge amount — never came through. This, as the fellow explained, is a relatively new tactic that credit card scammers have developed. It would seem that there are readily available ways to somewhat anonymously make these verification requests, and either tag on a $0.01 amount (if the system being used requires both at once) or just never send the second-half amount follow-up. The whole point, of course, is to identify valid accounts — so that they can be filed away and used down the road for something “for real”. Discover, being the sharp tacks that they are, is up on the game and now uses such events as reasons for freezing/deactivating accounts.

I found this all very interesting because at dinner that very night, Preble was relating to us a story about how someone he knows was out a not-inconsequential amount of money because of some credit card scammers — and they used a valid account number. As it turns out, the rest of the info they supplied didn’t check out, and the account only worked one time (for one charge attempt), but that was enough unfortunately.

All in all, I was fortunate: the old account was closed, Discover is shipping me a new card in 3-7 days, and no unauthorized transactions were posted.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 23rd, 2005 at 5:36:03 pm and is filed under WTF, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.