I know this has been asked before, and the UK is probably different anyway, but I wondered if anyone knows what happens after you report a fraud and get a refund.
I check my bank account at least a couple of times a week and last Tuesday I saw that around £200 worth of goods and shipping costs had been charged to my wife’s CC, I phoned the bank and a nice lady told me that a) I would get a refund in a matter of days, and b) They would pass it to the police for further action.
Today I see the credit on my statement but that leaves me wondering if the police really do follow this kind of relatively minor crime up, and since I am not out of pocket - who is?
When someone gets hold of an active CC, why would they use it to buy take-aways and £50 trainers? I would have expected to see disposable goods like phones and wearable electronics.
I still don’t understand that mentality.
The person stole the card (or number) and uses it for a small purchase to ‘test’ it. bob_2 sees the purchases, cancels the card and now the person that stole the card can’t use it anymore.
Why not just use it for a big ticket item right away?
Every time they use it (in combination with how long they have it), more likely to be cancelled. Instead of testing it by getting something for $20 and having it not work when they buy the $1000 item, why not just get the $1000 item? If it works, great, if it declines, you say ‘sorry, let me call the bank and see what’s going on’ and you get in your car and drive away.
People do just that all the time. Their card declines and they leave, there’s nothing really suspicious about it.
The way I see it, if you get a hold of a credit card or credit card number, you have one chance to use it. You might as well make it count.
Anyway, getting back to the OP, unless it’s small town, likely nothing will become of it. If the town is small enough, the police may go to the place where it was used and see if anyone remembers anything or if they have cameras they may have picked something up. If it’s a town with a population in the hundreds of thousands, I doubt the police will do much more than make a report. If there’s a problem with stolen CCs in the area, it might be part of that, but if it’s an isolated incident I really doubt the police would follow up on it.
At least that’s my WAG if it happened in my area in the states.
I suspect that thieves try with smaller, everyday, purchases to see if it works, because it’s quite possible that the person who owns the card won’t notice. I see a lot of credit card statements in my work, and there are some people who have tons and tons of transactions and probably wouldn’t notice at all if an extra fill up at a gas station or extra meal at McDonald’s was charged, assuming they had been there recently. When my info was stolen, it was used at a gas station somewhere in the metro area, though nowhere I would have been any time recently. I had email alerts on for all purchases and canceled it within an hour. If I had been a businessman making many trips various places during the day and buying things at each of them, I might not notice if there was an extra fuel purchase in there somewhere I had been. Most small businessmen are pretty bad at keeping tabs on exactly what they have purchased. At least, the ones I work with do; presumably if they kept good tabs on this stuff, they wouldn’t need what they mainly come to our firm for.