Online Fraud, Safe Shopping, Internet Security, Identity Theft

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU5xxh5UX4U

I miss getting stacks of post for our previous occupant, a Mister Lars Puke.

I get unsolicited emails addressed to Mrs Hot Bastardpants following a slightly drunken online rampage. My old address gets them too, mainly from Screwfix

^ lolz!

dooks any news?

Yeah man. I'd realised on Wednesday morning that some of our post had been going missing so rang to Barclays to let them know. I had to lean on them quite hard to get them to do anything. They were at that point still sticking to the "It takes five days before we allocate someone to look at your case" line until I pointed out, slightly testily, that this wasn't a couple of hundreds quid’s worth of dodgy credit card purchases, that it was tens of thousands of (mostly their) money and that we were totally nobbled by it having no working bank accounts.

After that their fraud people rang back within a couple of hours having been though it. Turns out that it all stemmed from our mortgage offer (also from Barclays) which had been "intercepted" by either postie or by someone at our local sorting office. Unbeknownst to us, when Barclays make an official offer they automatically set up an "offer account" which is just like a normal current account with debit cards, pin numbers and the "secure key" for online banking. All of which had been carefully filtered out of our post and used to get into my wife's online banking. From there they went on to clean out all of our accounts, apply for the loans, extend the overdrafts etc and then go to branches and kiosks to withdraw the cash and go on a shopping spree in Harrods on Saturday. They also spent £12 on lunch in EAT. Which strikes as me a bit lacking in ambition after all the trouble they went to with everything else.

Apparently there's been a spate of these types of fraud in my area recently SE11 Kennington/Oval to if you're nearby be careful. Upshot is that all of the online transfers and loans are being refunded and cancelled. The card purchases will take a bit longer to sort out (I assume we'll have to trawl though statements highlighting the fraudulanet transactions) but we should be up and running by tonight and hopefully back to normal fairly soon. Fingers crossed. Thankfully the mortgage offer is unaffected and we can still go ahead with that. What a palaver.

So if you're in the Kennington area and see a shifty looking postie with baguette crumbs on his blazer, punch him in the cock for me. Thanks.

Hah- me Julie's old office is in Oval, and they had their company cheque book stolen by (presumably) the postie, repeatedly.

She'd be going through the accounts to find that her company had bought a car on Jersey via cheque and so on.

They should be easy to spot- instead of a post office Transit they'll be driving a Rhinestone encrusted Bentley.

This seems totally trivial but I used these guys to buy some tom ford aftershave.

It never turned up, pretty much never any sign of it and they kept feeding me nonsense about where it was or who it was with. In the end I just gave up as it was a waste of time. I have since seen they are on Trust Pilot with a terrible score (if this had been there at the time, I'd have never used them)

If there are 30 negative reviews left on the site, they will show in search results and basically eff them - I'm not suggesting people do this but you know...

Also, is there anything I could do? I bought the Tom Ford from selfridges in the end - but wouldnt mind the two score back

It's actually fairly usual at this time of year. In the lead up to Christmas the post office hires a whole bunch of temp posties and people in the sorting office... I've worked for a couple of companies who send valuables by post and there was often a glut of things going missing in December.

^If in response to me. My order was made in July. I just wanted to vent..

My card was rejected last week so went into the bank... account had been blocked after some dodgy transactions (like $8000 to a charity in the US). None of the transactions went through - the old card has been blocked and destroyed and that... is there anything I need to do next? No way it can have an impact on my credit rating, right? No loans were taken out or anything, although obviously the potential transactions would've made me massively overdrawn. I'm really quite clueless about this sort of stuff.

I got done this weekend. 3 succesful attaempts at using my card on a gambling webiste, £50 each then the bank stopped it on the fourth.

Getting refunded the £150 this week, but a ballache waiting for a new card.

oh no! which website if I may?

Don't remember. I never used the gambling site, the lady on the phone just said someone had made the transactions there.

I had used my card on Amazon lately though.

I keep getting these text messages. I don't use Santander and don't have their number in my phone, nor can I reply to these texts as they don't seem to have come from an actual phone number. Any ideas on what's going on and how to stop it?
http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/3708/u6xf.png

It's possible that Santander have the wrong number for an account. If the messages have just started then it's also possible that the owner of the real account is actually being defrauded as of now and that the number that Santander hold for them has been changed to avoid detection. I'd forward the messages to Santander's fraud dept, personally: http://www.santander.co.uk/csgs/Satellite?appID=abbey.internet.Abbeycom&c=Page&canal=CABBEYCOM&cid=1210607007773&empr=Abbeycom&leng=en_GB&pagename=Abbeycom%2FPage%2FWC_ACOM_TemplateA2

I gave alibaba Express my debit card details the other day, kind of fretting about it because even providing an email address to them results in a gzilliion spam emails from all kinds of sources, so fear they like to share peoples personal info..

http://sciencespot.co.uk/wpa2-wireless-security-cracked.html

Dude from Brunel, London

Heartbleed. Fun and games for everyone online.

http://heartbleed.com/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26954540

Should we all be changing our lfgss password?

lfgss tests as safe but you'd have to speak to bossman to find out if he was ever running the compromised ssl gubbins. I don't know anything about lovethegas infrastructure.

going through all mine now, god it's T3di0u5

I heard this is good for managing password:

https://lastpass.com/

I presume that's a joke.

Or maybe not: http://blog.lastpass.com/2014/04/lastpass-and-heartbleed-bug.html

All3g3dly