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> ...frys actually challenged my chargeback...

Side note: if you have a fraudulent transaction on your credit card, don't call your credit card company and "dispute" a charge or ask for a "chargeback". Instead, call them and tell them you had a fraudulent transaction.

I had a clearly fraudulent charge on my Amex a few years ago (a Wal-Mart gift card was shipped to somewhere in Central California). I called Amex and asked to dispute the charge. Wal-Mart then provided Amex with the tracking info showing the package was signed for, and so they said that they had rendered the services paid for, and the case was closed in the merchant's favor.

It turns out that "fraud" is the magic word, not "dispute". I called Amex back and got into the fraud process instead, which of course fixed the issue.

Sorry, you are right, of course. Here, I used "chargeback" as a shortcut for saying I asked the bank to not pay out. My banks dispute form - a simple 1-pager - essentially leaves very little room for confusion in the nature of the dispute in any event. They have some 10-odd descriptions and one is supposed to pick the right, or closest one. I picked "I did not authorize nor was involved in this transaction".

In my country the "terminology" of credit card use isn't as evolved as it is in the US - we don't actually have well defined terms like "chargeback", "dispute" etc.

> Sorry, you are right, of course. Here, I used "chargeback" as a shortcut for saying I asked the bank to not pay out.

Which is what a chargeback is. In many cases if you let them know it was a case of identity theft, a different process is used and you are more likely to get your money back.

Amex is also in general more likely to side with a merchant than Visa/Mastercard, who pretty much never do.

What is this statement based on? I've been both a merchant and consumer, and haven't found this to be true at all.

Experience as a merchant. If we give Amex reasonable evidence that merchandise was received and a chargeback is unwarranted, there is a chance they will find in our favor, whereas Visa/Mastercard take the consumer's side almost unconditionally.

I suspect this because Amex is better staffed in this area.

What evidence do you provide? We've never once seen Amex side with us on a chargeback despite reams of evidence.

OK, Interesting, I haven't had the same experience, having won a few Visa chargeback attempts from customers that received merchandise as ordered. My experience is primarily B2B though, where there are credit card authorization and tax exempt forms involved. So, it's not like the customer can claim they can't recall ordering something, etc.

Based on what everyone else says, it's probably sample size. The number of people we have who buy something with their own card and then chargeback is pretty small for us (and it's usually in error).

A company I worked with had a dispute with a client over charges (fee for services + restocking fee) on her Amex. Amex allowed the client to keep disputing the charge multiple times. If the charge re-appears on her bill she'd file a new dispute.

Amex also directly provision merchant accounts for accepting Amex (separate to normal Visa/MC accounts) so they control both sides of the transaction.

> Experience as a merchant.

This is reasoning by anecdote; your experiences are not a valid sample size with which to draw such general conclusions about the whole field. Look how many are saying the opposite is true, your experience is probably an outlier, not the norm.

I think you have that backwards. Amex is the most consumer-friendly CC there is. Many retailers won't accept Amex for this reason.

Many retailers don't take Amex because they charge higher fees, not because they are consumer friendly (which they are).

In my experience, Amex is more likely to respond to a merchant presenting evidence that a chargeback is unwarranted. Visa/Mastercard essentially just say "tough luck," except in the case that a consumer has charged back by mistake.

I work at a bank and have extensive experience with this. Visa and Mastercard protect merchants while American Express protects consumers. Neither are absolute of course but these are the biases that each one has.

I find that the opposite is true. AMEX will advocate for the consumer, more so than VISA/MC (though that really depends on the financial institution).

So ten years ago I was fresh out of high school. Not a lot of money and I had accidentally left my debit card at a fast food joint. Fraud services called me later that day to inform me of various odd charges, none of which were mine.

Enraged I asked for the places and date/time stamps of transactions. I tracked the persons footsteps, some business owners allowed me to see security camera footage.

There she was, in her fast food uniform (the place I had ordered from earlier that day) in 3 different businesses at the exact same time of the debit card time stamps.

I took this information directly to the police were I was dismissed saying that my bank would do the investigation and not too worry about it. I went a head and spoke with the manager of the fast food joint as well. Morale of the story, the police don't do shit.

Try driving 40 mph in a 30 mph zone and see how quickly you are pulled over. It can't be in any area though; it needs to be in a mostly white middle to upper class area.

My theory is that police know that people pulled over in those areas are likely to be the responsible type who would pay for a ticket. And the person who stole and used your credit card is likely the type who would not pay tickets or fines but would end up having to spend time in jail. So, they target those who will pay tickets (a source of revenue) and ignore cases like yours that would result in no revenue.

As a business accepting credit card payments, we attempted to be good citizens at first. We would try to notify the credit card company or the banks when an obviously fraudulent transaction came in and that kind of thing. We even tried calling the police at one point with IP logs and so on.

Nobody gave a shit.

We asked our credit card processor, Stripe, what to do about fraudulent transactions. They told us that they had no way of notifying a bank about that kind of thing and to just refund it.

So now our policy is just to refund fraud and forget about it. It's a position we were forced in to. This means that the person whose credit card was stolen will continue to be abused and there really isn't anything we can do about it.

Same experience (Stripe) also had an increase in orders the days after target thing came out.

All very obviously fraudulent for example user in indonesia but cards from us

It seems that everyone has plenty reason to be irritated with credit card technology except the thieves. Hopefully there will be sufficient incentive to replace credit cards with something more secure in the next 5-10 years.

"Last year, I had four fraudulent transactions appear on my card. I am a very cautious user - Linux on the desktop, seperate user and browser profile for e-shopping etc. This was the first time it happened in over 15 years of extensive online card-use."

As a merchant who frequently gets bogus credit card order over the net I will confirm that nobody seems to particularly care about being notified that we feel it's highly probably that a credit card has been stolen. In other words there isn't a system in place even where a merchant who notices they have a stolen card being used can say "hey you should freeze this card or at least look into it".

It probably differs from issuer to issuer. In my experience Amex is very on top of it and they have always flagged every transaction I have not made myself, immediately sending push notification and SMS where I can ack/nak an automated transaction prompt. If I nak it they freeze the card and overnight a new one. I suppose they don't really care about handling it manually because that would be prohibitively expensive and they prefer to act on the patterns in an automated way. Would be interesting to see aggregate stats by card issuer of how good they are at detecting it.

Amex really is awesome about this. I was traveling not long ago and called them so they could put a travel flag on. I got to an automated response that their systems were smart enough to know if I was traveling and I no longer needed to call prior.

IME, Amex is much better at flagging than the Mastercard I have.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. I would say the bigger issue and thr lower hanging fruit is that we don't use Chip+Pin or Chip+Signature here in the US. Using either tech will go much further than just having police departments investigate after the fact.

That doesn't really help for online transactions. I'm not aware of any 2-factor authentication being used for online credit card transactions anywhere.

Actually, I more often than not have to verify my online purchases. I have to use my bank's online banking card reader with my card and pin code.

It is not the case for all transactions but for most Swedish online transactions this has been the case for the past few years.

It is called something along the lines of 3-D secure/Verified by Visa

That is true, I was referring solely to Target where it was physical transactions. There are other solutions that can be implemented for card not present transactions.

I've seen those :

- additional verification code sent by SMS (France), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-D_Secure

- bank provided card reader used with the card and pin code (Belgium)

Most online card transactions in the UK use a system called verified by visa (or it's MasterCard equivalent), which shows you a phrase you previously specified (to prove it is legitimate) then asks you to enter 3 characters of your password.

> Two of the transactions were with Netflix to register new streaming accounts.

I had Netflix and one day noticed I was billed twice on my credit card for Netflix service, one was OK but the other just appeared on my bill.

I used the online chat to talk to a Netflix rep who seemed unimpressed and not the least bit concerned (no frowny emoticon). I asked how a new charge I didn't authorize could appear on my credit card, she had no idea and just kept repeating the company line their system is unable to credit me, so I said but somehow it can magically take double the money? Nice.

Anyway, no apology, no concern so no Netflix.

In these situations, where it's pretty black and white, writing or emailing a senior executive, such as the EVP of Customer Relations (contact into on company website) typically will get the result you want.

>> I filed an online police report with San Jose police, where Frys is based.

You can forget about police doing anything to catch the criminals. The only good you get out of contacting police of such ID theft cases is that you can use the resulting paperwork to file claim with credit card company. Forget about police doing anything to actually go out to look for the criminals.

IMO, US police departments are firmly stuck in the mode of 'only-criminal-we-go-after-is-someone-with-a-gun-or-drug'.

It's been a while so the sequence of events is a bit fuzzy but basically I was a victim of ID theft a few years ago. A few checking/credit accounts opened using my name. 2 iPhones purchased using my name (not approved by me of course) at an official phone company store (meaning they were captured on security camera in the store). On Credit Report I pulled immediately after I learned what was happening, I saw my actual addresses and the criminals' addresses on the report. Interestingly the criminals were living in a 'dump' 1 year earlier but had since moved into a rental in a brand new condo complex. I mean a brand new, nice condo complex, also in San Jose area. I found out through Google Street View.

Now I had leads on their addresses and VIDEO FOOTAGE (in possession of the phone store in San Jose) of them existed. I was excited as I was headed to police station to file report. Well, what a disappointment. It seemed no one seemed interested in seeing the video footage. They just took my report (took me about 1+ hours in there). I got a generic confirmation letter from my police dept weeks later. I heard nothing from the police in San Jose. Weeks (or months later ?) I got a call from a US Postal Inspection Service investigator. He gave me names of 2 suspects and asked again if I knew them. I did not and am pretty sure they were the criminals. Thus the crime was being investigated by US Postal Inspection Service. So a potentially slam dunk case was being pushed around between 2 local police departments and a Federal agency. And the result was I was actually interviewed on the phone weeks/months after the crimes had occurred.

These pulps committed a crime that potentially cost someone else a few thousands bucks (cost of phone and fee and late fee), not to mention hours I had to spend to clean up the mess. But because the victim and criminals are in separate/distant jurisdictions, the police essentially did not do much on their own. They simply pushed the case off to a federal agency.

Had someone in my police department called San Jose police department to go look at a video foorage at a phone store and visit a local address up there, they could've caught the guys in a matter of hours or days.

Interestinly, months later I got a letter from landlord of the condo rental the criminals had rented. The landlord was demanding unpaid rent. The pulps had rented the complex using my name and when the fraudulent accounts were cut off and their money dried up, they fled without paying rent. The landlord's collector of course searched for my name and found the real 'me'.

The US police seems helpless with these crimes that cross multiple jurisdictions.

This might be a midwest thing but the police departments around me (Milwaukee, WI suburbs) will chase down something as insignificant as a kid using their friend's parent's credit card to buy a hundred dollars of Xbox points online.

Anecdotal counterpoint: when a waiter started skimming cards in a town I used to live in, the county sheriff actually did track them down and arrest them. Charges were filed but I don't remember what happened after that.

Of course, they also tracked down someone who stole a pair of sunglasses out of my car so my experience is likely atypical.

Yep I had a very similar experience