Carefully checking bank and credit card statements is essential – but easily overlooked. Doing so has saved me several hundred pounds over recent months.
In February of this year I received my monthly statement from American Express. The total was a lot higher than usual and I was shocked to see a charge of £510 in favour of the Royal Opera House in London, dating from January. I have never been to the Royal Opera House. Given the size of the transaction, I thought it likely that goods might have been bought online from its offices, though not by me. Probably a mistake, I assumed.
I challenged the transaction with American Express. It suspended the transaction, noting it as disputed. A few days later they sent me the Royal Opera House ‘sales note’, which made clear that the transaction had been conducted on my card through an email instruction and superficially appeared legitimate. American Express reinstated the £510 debt on my account.
At this point I contacted the Royal Opera House direct to determine the nature of the transaction. I still assumed the card had been used for a mail order purchase – not least because of the size of the bill.
The Royal Opera House responded quickly, politely and helpfully. They explained their shop did not have any record of the transaction, but that the Royal Opera House box office did. “I can see a ticket purchased for Aida for GBP 510.00 on the Box Office system, but as the shop, we do not operate it – this means I’m not a 100% sure about the dates and transaction details. From my understanding, the ticket was purchased on 24 January for a performance on 28 January.”
There was no question in my mind that this was a fraudulent transaction. It was my card that had been used, on a date when I was not in London, for an event that I would not have attended. Only once in my life have I attended an opera performance and that was in Milan. And I’m too tight to spend £500 on opera tickets.
Although I contacted the Box Office it was unable to provide me with any further details of the transaction – ironically this was for what seemed to be data protection reasons. While it was my card that was used, the Box Office could only disclose information to the person controlling the email that conducted the transaction – which, of course, was not me.
I then reported the fraud to the police via the National Fraud & Cyber Crime Reporting Centre, also known as ‘Action Fraud’ (https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/). This was a simple online process that took only a few minutes. I retained a copy of the report, which I forwarded to American Express, along with my correspondence with the Royal Opera House. This was effective, as AmEx then accepted the transaction had been fraudulent and permanently removed the charge from my account. (American Express was contacted for this article asking if it wished to comment, but it did not respond to the invitation.)
A few days later, the PSNI phoned me at the request of the Metropolitan Police, which operates the Action Fraud service. The PSNI officer wanted to check if I was vulnerable to falling victim to further frauds. It is embarrassing to admit that despite having been a financial journalist for three decades it was only after the officer asked if I had cancelled the card and had it replaced that I realised that I should have done this promptly, but had failed to do so.
I had been victim to a cardholder not present fraud and obviously it was important to replace the card. There are several ways that a person might have been able to conduct this – they might have worked in a shop and taken a photo of my card, or else worked in a place which provided access to transaction details, but the most likely explanation is that an e-commerce site was hacked and personal financial information stolen. My guess is that the person who bought the tickets on my charge card for a performance of the Aida opera sold them at the door of the theatre.
Cardholder not present fraud is the most common credit and debit card fraud, responsible for 81% of all reported card frauds, according to industry body UK Finance. This compares to just 15% of card frauds resulting from cards being lost or stolen. The statistics are massive: there were 2.2 million cases of cardholder not present fraud in 2022 across the UK, leading to losses just short of £400m.
In this instance, I had been blameless – apart from not immediately protecting myself from further fraud my cancelling the card. But I have been more negligent in other instances. A few weeks earlier I noticed that I was being charged for membership of Amazon Prime – a service that I thought I diligently avoided.
On this occasion, the card issuer asked if I could guarantee that no one else could use my computer – and the truth is that I do let family members use it. And one of those had unintentionally ticked the box agreeing to Prime membership. My failure to properly monitor my card account meant that it was only the third monthly charge that I noticed. There was nothing for the card issuer to do as the mistakes were mine.
I contacted Amazon saying that I did not want Prime membership and that it had been a mistake. To my surprise, Amazon’s call handler was extremely helpful, promptly cancelled the membership and made a full refund on the basis that the membership had not been used.
A friend of my daughter was another victim when she was charged £900 for a flight from a year earlier that she had already paid for. This wiped out her bank balance. I contacted her bank, HSBC, hoping to accelerate a refund. My daughter’s friend reports: “HSBC called me this morning to let me know they’ve refunded the money and handed the case over to the police!” Hopefully this means that the matter is now resolved as far as she is concerned.
HSBC’s spokesman commented: “As this case highlights, keeping an eye on your bank statements is really important, it should be easy to do through your mobile banking app and might only take a couple of minutes. Not only will it help you keep track of where your finances are at any moment in time, but it should also highlight any suspicious transactions or payment errors so they can be addressed and rectified.”
There have been several recent high profile cases of large corporates having their systems hacked. In some instances, this could lead to personal financial information being used to conduct fraud, creating an additional reason to carefully check bank and card statements. Challenging and resolving fraud and over-charges can often be undertaken easily and quickly.
Paul Gosling