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
That argues against an Amazon hack as the source for compromised card info.
3 complaints report seeing transient $1 "ping" charges, that appear and go away just before the fraudulent "Digital Star" charges. One of those complaints reports 3 "pings" to 3 cards, via Amazon, so that makes a total of 5 "pings" associated with immediately following fraudulent charges.
Sites used to "ping" or test card data:
Amazon: 3
Speedway: 1
ATT: 1
The capability to use "pings" is similar across all 3 complaints, and all 5 reported pings. Pings show up adjacent to immediately following fraudulent charges, and our inferences rely on the reported consumer observations, not assumptions or conclusions, so the pattern has high credibility reinforced by 3 sources, and also high diagnosticity in supporting the "ping" hypothesis.
The weakness exploited to obtain card info may be these "pings", rather than a database hack. In contrast, the reports of seldom used, or even unused cards showing fraudulent charges argues against a hack.
Finding and exploiting sites for "pinging" is similar to finding and exploiting abandoned merchant account sites, as it might make use of similar web search and probing capabilities, and shows a similar knowledge of and capability to exploit website security weaknesses.
"The stolen numbers may be sold and re-sold, lumped into blocks, then sold to a crime syndicate. Then they do one big operation (like this) with a bogus or defunct company (like Digital Star) and play the numbers game to get what they can before it is shut down."
That would mean there may be no common thread of use of the cards, simply a lumping together of several separate incidents of theft from different places.
Bank connections are all over the map, BofA, Citi, Chase, CapOne, several credit unions, etc.
Mixture includes both debit and credit cards, even a couple business card accounts.
Geography of victims is also mixed: north central Illinois, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, California, Oregon, Toronto, South Dakota, Vancouver, Wa, AZ, Atlanta, GA, oklahoma, Canada, Northern Minnesota, etc.
Widespread geography argues against skimming.
The one common connection is "Digital Star", supposedly defunct, yet no one reports doing business with them, with only one report of doing business with a similar ticker seller.
This was timed to start at about the same time Digital Star was scheduled to be "dissolved", but the notices of its dissolution would have given notice months earlier that it might provide an opportunity for this scam. In fact, it shows up a couple days BEFORE the 1-29-12 dissolution date.
Website is still up.
Failure to shut it down implies most of these bank disputes are being handled by the banks as "billing disputes", otherwise it should be raising immediate red flags with the payment processor, whoever that is. Although some banks are reported to be treating this as fraud, many complaints report handling it as a "merchant billing dispute".
+**2081237377
I use Amazon but haven't bought anything for a while from them.