Credit Card Fraud

My first experience with online credit card fraud happened today.

When doing my monthly bill paying/checkbook balance ritual, I noticed a couple of charges for $9.95 from two online companies I've never heard of- Moball LLC and U-Webtemplate.com

Now, I do use my credit card online from time to time- most notably with a recent surge of Ebay purchases a couple of months ago- and I'm pretty aware of the transactions. I keep all records of them in my email, so I can go back and double check a charge if I'm unsure of where it came from.

No record of these companies, and just the names sounded off (in particular, the U-Webtemplate one- I do my own html programming, and use Eversoft Firstpage- freeware- for my web design, so I know I've never made a purchase for any sort of web template.)

I did a little bit of research online, and found a couple of places where other people had been victims of fraudulent charges by these two companies. Most notably, at Robert K. Brown's blog. A quick look over that blog shows that many, many people have been the victims of this fraud.

Sadly, outside of blogs, no one in the mainstream media seems to have taken any notice of this, or cared enough to report it. From a lot of the posts, it doesn't even seem like the credit card companies are all that concerned about it themselves.

Anyway, long story short, I called my bank, cancelled my card, and filed a fraud charge with them. Hopefully that will take care of things.

In any case, I hope the awareness of these fraudulent companies will be raised, and hope that this blog will help a little bit. Be careful!

Some links:

A Work In Progress: U-Webtemplate
A Work In Progress: Digital Age Update
Credit Card Fraud Security
Internet Crime Complaint Center