How did I get made party to a scam?

July 3, 2009 1:31 PM

A random person in a city I don't live in called me and said he was seeing two charges for $155 each on his bank statement, and his bank says I'm the party that the payments were made to. What kind of scam is this, how did I get involved, and what's my responsibility?

These are point-of-sale charges his bank says were made with his debit card. On his statement, where the merchant information is, appears a domain name that happens to be where I have my resume, and then the first few lines from my resume appears, including my contact info.

Is this a result of something I might have done, or did somebody just scrape my website randomly to populate the merchant information? Why would the bad guy go to that trouble, rather than just putting in something like ACME Widgets, 1234 Main Street, Anytown USA? Am I at risk at all here? It's obviously not my money, but this is the second call I've gotten in the past few months like this. How can I end this?

I should note that each of these two callers seemed satisfied when I explained that I had nothing to do with their charges and they should work it out with their bank.

posted by stupidsexyFlanders to law & government (12 comments total)

Scam. If it was legit you would have been contacted by his bank, not by him. You can check your own bank statements to see whether you have been credited with any payments in error, but I doubt that you have been. Even if you had, what he's saying appears on his statement makes absolutely no sense.

Even if his card had been skimmed, it wouldn't explain the fake merchant details he's claiming are appearing on his statement. You can certainly fuck around with POS terminals in all kinds of ways, but the information going into the system can't be random - it at least needs to be in a format the system would recognise as valid.

That said, I'd love to know if this is a playing the numbers thing where the caller is just hoping that some people will be stupid enough to offer "reimbursement".
posted by Lolie at 2:05 PM on July 3 [3 favorites]

I've never heard of this scam before, however, I don't think you have any responsibility. A domain, on its own, is not a merchant. If you have no credit card processing account attached to that domain. If you don't have the ability to process credit cards, you don't have the ability to charge him, so this is not something you could have done.

My guess is that they comb domain ownership/whois records and then fake bank statements and hope to find a sucker to fall for the scam and figure reimbursing the person is easier than dealing with the issue, or a business that does process credit cards and just reimburses before they investigate with the credit card processor. It's not always immediately obvious which website are attached to businesses that process credit cards. For instance, I have a website for my marketing company. I don't take payments through my company website, but my clients do pay by credit card and the line item on their credit card statement shows up as mycompany.com. They could just be processing fake statements in bulk and if the scam works a couple times, great. Though it does seem like a lot of work for little reward.

It's also possible that they're trying to figure out which sites are attached to credit card processing businesses to try to get into the server and harvest credit card data? That doesn't seem entirely likely either.

Did you actually see the statement, with the person's name and bank name? You can try asking their bank what's going on or report it to your whoever hosts your domain and wherever your domain is registered. If you're registered with godaddy, switch to private registration. Other services might do this as well, I don't know. But if your info is private, I think this might stop happening.
posted by necessitas at 2:24 PM on July 3

Weird, but in any case, if you've got your actual phone number in a publicly accessible resume on your website I would take it off at once - bolting the stable door, but still...
posted by Phanx at 2:34 PM on July 3

If they call again, ask for their contact info and then tell them you'll have your lawyer call them. Then forget about it. If it is indeed a scam, you can be sure they won't call back.
posted by JuiceBoxHero at 2:36 PM on July 3

> Scam. If it was legit you would have been contacted by his bank, not by him.

It may not be a scam-- or rather, it may be a scam, but not on the part of the guy who called you.

A couple of years ago I received a flood of irate phone calls from various people, complaining about being billed by one of my sites.

It turned out-- as nearly as I can determine-- that a third party had set up a commission-earning affiliate link via an advertising network where I have an account; gotten some stolen credit card numbers; used those credit card numbers to purchase my products; and then collected the sales commissions.

The banks of those whose credit card numbers were used then gave them my contact number.

Another time, in an unrelated episode, I received complaints related to a phone company, or a purported phone company, that listed my number as theirs.

Bottom-line: Scams are everywhere, and can take many forms... so it can be hard to predict, let alone track down, where the problem lies. You might even want to check your credit report, just to make sure your identity hasn't been swiped somewhere along the way.
posted by darth_tedious at 2:53 PM on July 3

Maybe just pop into your bank and see what they make of it all? If they suspect any kind of shenanigans sort it out whilst you're there :)
posted by mu~ha~ha~ha~har at 3:24 PM on July 3

The people who called me were definitely not looking for anything from me, just seemed sincerely PO'd and confused.

I don't have any merchant accounts related to this domain. I'm not part of any advertising network. All I have is a paypal account that I have set up to take credit cards, but that's on another domain, not this one.

I guess I'll just keep a close eye on my credit report.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 4:04 PM on July 3

I might be the groundwork for a scam. Get you interested in the human story, etc.

It's just odd that they'd call you and not... say... take your info to the police instead.
posted by jerseygirl at 4:52 PM on July 3

Look up his bank's information independently, verify that they are indeed a bank, call them, and ask them if you owe him money. If they say that you do, ask about the circumstances behind this situation.
posted by koeselitz at 6:34 PM on July 3

If they call you, you have no way of knowing who the hell they are; if you call them, you can verify beforehand that they are who they say they are.

It would be even better if you could physically walk into this bank and talk to someone, but it sounds like you can't.
posted by koeselitz at 6:35 PM on July 3

Last year I received about 4 phone calls at random times from different people in Georgia and Tennessee saying that one of my websites had been charging them and they wanted it to stop. They seamed genuinely confused but EVERY SINGLE TIME I would offer them to email me details so that I could "get to the bottom of this" I would never receive one.

Note: my phone number was listed on the site. It no longer is.

I never heard back from anyone and I would think a bank would contact me, not some random dude from Georgia.

(I'm in Canada, by the way)
posted by 913 at 8:00 PM on July 3

Just to put in a bit about whether or not the bank would call. At the bank that I work at, we get dozens of complaints each day from people who have weird charges on their account. We always have to tell them to make an attempt to contact the merchant before we'll initiate a chargeback. We give the customer as much info as we have from the credit card processor, usually just the full business name and type of business, and they'll often have to do the web searches themselves to find the company contact information.

And then the customer calls us back, frustrated because they're not getting anywhere, and we do the chargeback.
posted by saffry at 6:03 AM on July 4