I had my card number improperly swiped and used to make two purchases. The bank contacted me and I’m working to get the two charges reversed or whatever.
I called the companies that sent the items and found out that one of the items was sent to a different state.
The other item was sent to my home.
Other than asking about what else I should do.
What is the reason why a scammer would use my card and send the expensive item to my house?
I’ve heard that crooks will swoop in and steal the item as soon as its delivered. But it seems like my number was used by people out of state and not in my neighborhood.
I happened to be at home so got the package; then immediately put the empty box out on my porch for a few hours expecting someone to come by and take it, but no one did.
So what advantage does someone get by ordering an item and sending it to my house?
I have heard that some volume crooks have an army of peons who can be used to pick up something left on a porch and forward it. Usually these are dupes and eventually lose money or wise up, but meanwhile, the crook has an extra layer of isolation from the crime.
It also could be a test to see if the credit card works.
I’m guessing they put your address in both the billing and shipping addresses. They would need your address for billing, but they may have mistakenly also put it in as the shipping address instead of their own delivery location.
I’ve never understood the point of ‘testing’ the card. I always hear about someone making a small purchase or using it for gas before they buy big ticket items. It seems to me, especially nowadays when people often know their card has been charged within seconds, that the clock starts ticking on it being shut off as soon as you use it. Regardless of if it’s for $6000 at Best Buy or $5 worth of gas. Why get bother getting 2 gallons of gas and make it more likely it won’t work at Best Buy? If I stole credit cards, I’d rather use it for the big ticket item first.
Keep in mind, no one asks for an ID and in most cases, the cashier doesn’t even touch the card. If it declines you can simply say 'That’s strange, let me go call the bank/talk to my SO/get my other card from my car etc and walk away.
To me, that’s like deciding if you’re going to rob a house by first breaking in and stealing their toaster with plans of going back tomorrow for the jewelry if it goes well. You’re forgetting that by tomorrow everything will be secured, the neighborhood will be on the lookout and there could be a security system installed.
It could be an attempt to foil the anti-fraud detection the credit card company uses. A purchase made from a different state, sent to a different address, will be flagged almost every time. But if it’s shipped to your house, it might not trigger the alarm. Then when they make second purchase, well, you just made a purchase from this new state, so another purchase must be OK, right?
No idea if this ever works (given that the company called you, I’d say not), but it might explain the purchaser’s thought pattern.
I know what it is, I’m curious as to why it’s used. Also,your LMGTFY link doesn’t actually answer the question you think it does. Literally every link on the first page is for test credit card numbers, which are regularly/legitimately used by merchants to test their credit card machines and websites, not why people that steal credit cards test them first.
Joey P, perhaps you didn’t see the quote I pulled from one of the sites. I think it answers the question very well. The other links, not so much, but I wasn’t going to post a quote without an attribution.
But people have been testing credit cards since before they were being regularly sold on the internet. It happens all the time when people steal a physical credit card, first a few dollars at a gas station, then the high ticket items.
And, even in the case of buying numbers on the dark web, I still don’t understand why you’d risk alerting the person that their number is compromised by testing them first.
If there was a purchase on my card that I didn’t make, it wouldn’t matter if it was for just a few dollars, or for several hundred, my card would be turned off just as fast either way.
It’s been going on forever, so either there’s a reason that I’m not understanding or there isn’t a reason and people just think it’s what you’re supposed to do with a stolen card/number.
But I think Joey’s question is, why test by buying something you don’t want? Why not test with the purchase you actually want to make? Is the sale of the credit card numbers somehow conditional on proving that they work first?
I have bought items online and put in the shipping address I needed them shipped to, only to have the vendor obstinately ship the damn thing to my home address anyway.
I would assume hackers and thieves are subject to the same vendor fuckups as everyone else.
And then you’ve failed at your objective of getting the big-ticket item from Best Buy: you’re walking out empty-handed. You don’t know if the credit card you bought somewhere works, in fact the odds are that a bunch of the credit cards you bought have already been deactivated. Testing it and only going into Best Buy when you have one that’s likely to work increases the odds that you’ll be walking out with something valuable.
Few people are alerted on every purchase. If you test a card and go to Best Buy quickly, I’m willing to bet that 90% of people won’t know what happened until the crook is gone with the loot.
To me, a better analogy would be: You test-fire your stolen gun somewhere else before you go into the bank to shoot the guard and rob the safe. There is a chance that someone might hear the test shot and call the cops, but if you take some precautions that’s unlikely.
I had that happen to me once. Some kid in Norway got my CC number and bought a CD, and the seller (in Japan) sent it to my US address. A few e-mails between me and the seller got it straightened out.
Who cares if you walk out empty handed? If the number wasn’t valid, you weren’t going to get anything anyways. If you have a good card, you will get something, but if you test it first, you might not.
My whole point is that every time you swipe the card, you’re increasing the chance that it won’t work at the next place. Either because the card holder gets notifications, they have more time to notice it’s missing (in the case of a physical card) or the credit card companies notice the odd purchases and shut the card down on their own.
You’re right in that a lot of people don’t get a notification each time their card is used, especially for small ticket items. But it’s certainly more than zero.
But using the card at the gas station isn’t taking precautions. Using the card is using the card. You can go hide in the basement of a motel and use the card, the credit card company sees the charge, the cardholder has the ability to notice it.
If you’re going to compare it to a gun, it would be like testing it in the front yard of the person you stole it from. Sure, there’s a good chance you can get in your car and drive away before anyone really thinks anything of it, but there’s a non-zero chance you’ll get noticed and won’t actually make it to the bank.
Testing the card at a gas station isn’t the same as testing the stolen gun at a range.
I suppose my issue with all this is that it goes back decades. People have been testing cards since forever. And again, this has certainly been happening long before people were skimming and cloning cards. Plenty of times I heard someone say they got their wallet or purse stolen and when they called the credit card company, there was a purchase for gas and then a big ticket item. So this doesn’t have anything to do with buying hundreds of numbers and trying to find the working ones.
I suppose the most plausible answer I’ve read is that if it declines at the gas station you can drive away. You don’t have to worry about the cashier seeing a message on the terminal reading “STOLEN CARD” while you’re face to face with them and there’s 200 feet of shopping carts, customers and parking lot before you get to your car.
Not everyone goes online every couple of hours to check if there’s a new unauthorized purchase on their credit card. Sometimes I’ll even just pay it at the end of the month without reviewing the charges. All times my credit card number has been compromised it’s been the bank that caught it and called me.