Not-so-comedy
April 9th, 2006
Last night I went with some friends to the the Comedy Store, which was really funny. This morning I got up and went to get some cash, but the machine told me I’d already withdrawn £200 today. That wasn’t so funny.
So it seems over the past few days that someone has siphoned just over £800 from my bank account. Since all the withdrawals are from cash machines and none in-store, I assume that my card was cloned and my PIN stolen. Needless to say, this is really, really annoying.
I phoned my bank and cancelled my card, which adds to the annoyance – I won’t have a valid card for the next few days. Meanwhile, some bastard is walking around with almost a grand of my money and will probably never be caught. (Mind you, the guy I talked to at the bank said I could fill out a form to get my money back.)
Wasn’t this what chip and PIN was supposed to help prevent? I guess that, while all stores are now using it, cash machines have yet to be upgraded. Also, it appears that cash machines will fall back to using the magnetic strip if there is no chip (as there would be on a skimmed card).
The solution? Maybe I should deface my magnetic strip on my new card. At least then it couldn’t be skimmed, but I’d still be able to use it in any cash machines that do have the chip and pin upgrade.
Or maybe, I should just be much, much more careful when putting my PIN in.
4 Comments Add your own
1. SteveC | April 9th, 2006 at 9:22 pm
WIll be interesting to see if you get your money back, the real main point of CAP was to transfer liability of fraud on to you the consumer. From your banks point of view you must have given your PIN out and not kept it secret like your contract says. In the good old days you would have just got your money back straight away – I did. Will be interesting to see what this form you have to fill says?
2. Matt | April 10th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
It had a few questions:
To which the answers are: (see post), in my wallet, no, no-one.
The nice people at the bank and the police station seemed to think there would be no problem recovering my stolen money. And, thankfully, there don’t seem to have been any further transactions (the card was cancelled, so I’d be really annoyed if there were…)
3. fanboi | May 18th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Did you get the money back?
4. Matt | May 19th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
Yeah, thankfully. But not from the guy who stole it… The bank sent me a letter a couple of weeks ago saying they were crediting it to me.
I just hope the police caught the person who did this, but (according to the nice police woman I talked to) its highly unlikely.
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