Internet Fraud / Identity Fraud

[str]

I have made a silly mistake and replied to an email, which I though came from my broadband provider, Tiscali, asking to confirm details, so I have given the fraudsters my home address, D.O.B, bank visa number, security number off the bank, mother maiden name

Have been berated by her indoors, so punishment enough

Have spoken with my bank and they have cancelled the card, so no payments can come off it and nothing suspicious has came off my account.

My new worry is the fraudsters using my identity for some scam, etc - anyone aware of any organisation that deals with this? Obviously, if I can prevent it all the better.

The wife had been sent info from a compant called Privacy Guard, who seemed to monitor activity on your credit report and so, warn you of any activity you weren't aware of, all for £69 per year - sounded like a bit of a rip off but now I'm not so sure!

 

[Mw Roofline]

I know the horse has already bolted but always check to see if the email is addressed to your name and not "Dear internet user" or "Dear valued customer" etc

Also when you hover your mouse over the link, the real address will appear in the bottom left corner of the grey bar on your screen. So without clicking and just hovering www.tiscali.co.uk is real and www.tiscali.co.uk directs you somewhere else.

All the banks now never ask you for your details by email but there are some good fake sites out there. The best one was from lloyds TSB asking me to confirm something and a quick hover over lloydstsb.com and I thought it was ok, then I noticed the spelling

 

[Mw Roofline]

Oh, and as long as you are careful, you don't need to bother with Privacy Guard. We pay enough as it is with all these other insurances out there.

 

[str]

I know that now having been "educated" by the all knowing wife

The email was to me and her indoors also recieved one but noticed it was a fake!

 

[AndrewSchofield]

I never give out my security or personal details to people by e-mail or over the phone unless they are either friends/people i know or i have rung them so i know who i'm speaking to. If my bank contacted me and asked me for details before they'd speak to me i'd tell them to do one. If they're ringing me they're probably trying to sell me something i don't want anyway.

Hope everything turns out OK for you - i don't what else you can do other than cancel your card which you've already done.

 

[Mw Roofline]

I know that now having been "educated" by the all knowing wife

The email was to me and her indoors also recieved one but noticed it was a fake!

You do realise now that for the rest of your life whenever you are doing any kind of internet transaction using credit/debit cards your wife will be saying "Now remember what happened....."

 

[MarkBarl]

Not sure who you bank with, but LloydsTSB do Identity Theft Protection as a benefit of their Platinum current account which includes monitoring of any check on your credit rating. I expect other banks do similar.

 

[JohnD]

also change your email address, as yours has now been added to the register of "gullible mugs".

best to have an email which is not in the "[email protected]" format.

 

[^woody^]

How do we know that the OP is the real str?

It would help if he confirms his credit card details to prove his identity

 

[str]

How do we know that the OP is the real str?

It would help if he confirms his credit card details to prove his identity

well, I may as well as you can probably buy my card details off some dodgy site at the moment

 

[Johnmelad502]

I have made a silly mistake and replied to an email, which I though came from my broadband provider, Tiscali, asking to confirm details, so I have given the fraudsters my home address, D.O.B, bank visa number, security number off the bank, mother maiden name

My wife lost her card several weeks ago but did not notice it missing. By the time she did and I checked our bank account, I noticed that whoever had it/was using it, was spending less than half of what the wife spent each week.

So I have never reported it missing, have saved an absolute fortune.

 

[peteftw]

this turned out not to be a 'how-to' thread as id hoped but this wee gadget looks like it would be useful for anyone who was interested:

http://megaspy.net/product_info.php/cPath/44/products_id/91?osCsid=d513cad49af40980b6e606787e9cd521

 

[D_Hailsham]

I uses the multiple "dummy" email addresses facility courtesy of Yahoo. Each address consists of a fixed prefix, e.g dummy, and as any suffixes as you like. So you can have dummy-bank"at"yahoo, dummy-diynot"at"yahoo, etc. I give out the relevant dummy to the bank or Diynot etc. When the email is received by yahoo it is forwarded to my true yahoo address, which then forwards it to my mail box at my ISP. This puts it through at least two spam and virus filters as well as those on my own PC

This way, if I receive an email addressed to me at dummy-bank, which is not from my bank, I know that there is a security problem and I can inform the bank.

The number of dodgy emails and spam I now receive is about one a week; and that's because they have got hold of an old email address, which is still valid. That will go someday soon.

 

[Shytalkz]

A while back I gave up using email on my moby, as I was inundated with spam and phishing emails. When I changed the phone, I mentioned that a usueful tool was being strangled by the sheer volume of spam and the guy suggested routing everything through a google account first, then pulling onto the phone from that account.

It works a treat: I also use mailsort for the pc which doesn't route via Googlemail and it's quite interesting seeing the vast numbers of emails that are (correctly) stripped out by the google filter as spam/phishing when I compare what's on my phone to what's in my pc inbox.

 

[tim west]

There is software out there which will defeat keyloggers whether they be hardware or software, i have run KeyScrambler for many years now in case i accidently picked up a logger whilst surfing its given piece of mind to see the banner appear each time i type and see the scrambled cryptic text appear.