Digital Star unauthorized charge
Complaint
Steve
Country: United States
A preauthorization for $74.95 from Digital Star with a bad phone number (208-123-7377) showed up on my debit card account 1/29/12. Called bank fraud department and had the account killed immediately. They stopped the charge since it had not completed. Do not know who Digital Star is or what the charge was for. I use the card for online purchases mainly through Amazon. No purchases in the last 30 dqays. However, I placed orders in the last 60 days from a company called Turncraft (woodworking plans), Personal Creations, and Entirely Pets. I wonder what companies others have used recently.
Comments
If via your debit card, have your bank block the card number, and do NOT issue or activate a new one.
Only request an ATM card requiring a PIN, and use only credit cards for online or retail purchases.
If the banks are systematically failing to protect your money accessed through debit cards, then stop using debit cards.
That argues against any of the online merchants you paid via Paypal as a target of a hack.
I visited my Chase branch in person, and had a very nice talk with my bank representative.
We cancelled the card, provided me with a temp ATM card and new card coming in 7/10 days. I filled out a fraud affidavit on the spot and should have my funds re-deposited within three days. It was painless.
They had not heard of this scam by Digital Star and it was only through my complaint that alerted them.
It appears that I caught this in time, but it will be a hassle to re-establish accounts with vendors. But....it's a numbers game. How many have not disputed this charge and not even looked at their statements? - letting the scum get away with this crime. I appreciate reading about others woes regarding this and contribute.
Joe
I am just thinking of the unfornuate people who are of very limited means and their last $74.99 or more is ripped out of their account without their consent.
Trying to cancel the card and reverse the transaction also. We do buy from Amazon but not recently. We do use the card regularly to book rooms on Priceline though.
The diversity of cards and usage patterns argues against a hack as the source of card information.
They don't need the CCV number to run through a charge, so the exp. date guessing odds aren't bad if you can test them quickly for free.
No one has reported any attempt by this "business" to dispute, or even respond to, their fraud disputes, as a legitimate business that actually sold something might.
The charges themselves are going through the merchant account of a business, "digital star", that supposedly just shut down. They started showing up a couple days before they were supposedly "dissolved". Recent reports are that the phone number is not in service.
Additional evidence of "pinging" has shown up in a complaint reporting $1 Amazon charges showing up against 3 cards on one day, then disappearing, followed by the standard larger charges the next day from "digital star". The $1 charges are the "ping", cancelled to leave less of a trail, with the money grabbing charges run through the unwatched defunct company account.
Amazon "pinging", and exploiting a defunct company and its account, shows that you are dealing with someone capable of finding, recognizing, and exploiting merchant account weak security opportunities.
Similar skills could be used to find weakly secured sites to use for testing or "pinging" card information prior to the digital star charges.
The victims with the least problems appear to be those with fraudulently charged credit cards. Those with debit cards have bank dispute results ranging from immediate reversal of the charge, blocking the card with a new card issued, to money missing until they "investigate".
This scam has shown that they are not secure, and the banks are doing little to secure the system against this type of attack. They are treating each fraudulent charge separately, and not shutting off the fraudulent source. This will expose unsuspecting consumers to substantial risk of fraud losses until the account is shut down.
Do NOT activate debit cards, block any that you have, and do not activate replacement debit cards. Obtain a PIN protected ATM card if you must, but use only credit cards for online or retail purchases, as the federal fraud protections are stronger.
My advice is only, if you have a choice, vote with your money.
Look after your own interests, rather than just blindly believing the bank advertising as they pitch their debit card products.
The banks have sold the whole concept of debit cards to the general public as "safe", supposedly preferable to credit cards without actually delivering on their promises. (Why? "Because you all need our help to manage your finances?"), They prefer debit cards because they are more profitable, to them. They were even more profitable before the debit card merchant fees were reduced recently.
They have been lax with following up on fraud and security breaches with credit cards, but there the damages largely affected their own profits, so they just balanced the costs of better fraud follow-up against the actual losses, and made a business decisions to tolerate some level of ignored fraud, both in their own fraud departments, and by their peers, other banks and payment processors.
Here, they are pushing more of the risk and loss onto the consumer, even as they pitch the product as "safe". The criminals know their system vulnerabilities, and are gaming their fraud policies, adjusting the level of fraudulent charges to fly under the radar of the bank fraud policies, diversifying the range of banks they send charges through to limit visibility in one place, creating the appearance that the fraudulent charges are merchant errors through some real business, etc.
With their current policies, the banks are selling a defective product with false and misleading advertising while maximizing their own profits but ignoring the very real collective consumer risk of fraud loss created by their fraud policies.