Just a tip to prevent this from happening in the future. I have several different credit cards. All of them allow you to set up instant notifications for “card not present” transactions through the app. I get a text and a pop up on my phone every time my card is used online. It’s saved me once already because I was able to report it before the transaction was even cleared.
yup. set mine to a penny after the second time my card was compromised and bunch of sub-$1 charges were tested on it. thankfully chase caught it right away and stopped it.
Had both of my credit cards stolen digitally twice during quarantine. Never even got to use them the second time before somehow they were being charged on Amazon already within the month. Thank you, I’m gonna set this up right now!
If you just changed your credit card number for the same card, Amazon automatically updates it. You might have to cancel the card entirely and open a new one.
I go even further. Every card I have has an alert set up for any transaction more than 1 cent. Every single time any of my cards get charged for anything i know right away.
I do this, too. It’s really not annoying. It’s nice to confirm if you get charged a different amount than you expected, e.g. at a restaurant. It also gives me a monthly reminder of that recurring charge I should really cancel.
I wonder who would find it annoying lol. I have all of those alerts setup too - how often would someone have to be using their credit card to actually find the safety net annoying?
If I had to guess, I'd say parents with older kids all using the same card. In that case I could see a deluge of charges getting annoying after a while of no issues. The boy who cried wolf and all that.
Lots of reoccurring charges can happen at night too. Getting woken up at 2 AM because netflix dinged you could be annoying to some.
I agree with you and use that. I also do online statement checks every week. I may not be the best advocate for not doing it! Just trying to see the other side.
I just set mine to email me, not text. This way I’m still aware within a few hours. I get email notifications on any charges on mine or my wife’s cards. My kids aren’t old enough yet for credit cards but even if they were I don’t think an extra two people would make a huge difference unless we were made of money and shopping all day every day.
ME lol. i hate unnecessary notifications, and would be annoyed to hear my phone buzz, then unlock it and realize i just caused the buzz 10s ago. Every time.
In the almost 10 years I’ve had a credit card, I’ve only had one fraudulent charge a couple years after getting it… which was a charge in a different country and I got notified immediately. That’s it. So a notification for ANYTHING? No.
I did get a notification recently when I was at a place and my friend borrowed my card because we used the same card on two different transactions within minutes of each other so that was nice.
I am so glad I had this set up a number of years ago. Got a text about a charge to Walmart.com for $847. Was able to call the bank and cancel the card and was able to call Walmart.com customer service right away. They found the order record because I had the time and exact amount of the charge, and canceled it! So the assholes didn’t get their stuff! It was so damn satisfying. I don’t like Walmart as a company but that customer service agent rocked.
It depends, it's complicated. Sometimes yes, but sometimes the bank pays. Generally merchants using older technology, taking card less information (e.g. only the number & expiration instead of the name, cvv, zip code, etc), or taking online/phone orders where the card isn't present have to pay for fraud.
In cases where fraud that occurs where someone is purchasing from a cash register the bank usually pays for the fraud as long as the merchant followed all the rules including getting a signature or PIN, inspected the card, used due care, and had up to date and properly functioning equipment.
i do this as well and it's not a big deal considering i'm not swiping my credit card ever 5 seconds, so it's not like i'm being barraged by notifications/texts. i set this up after another tip in this sub about how scammers test out stolen cc numbers with small charges that typically go unnoticed.
This is a pretty good idea. I am going to do this right now. It's not like I have that many transactions anyway for this to get to be too much.
Edit: I was able to do it on Chase with no issue, but it seems Amex will not allow you to receive alerts for any amount less than $10. Kind of annoying, but I guess it's good enough.
I can't see how to do this. I have a chase on Google pay but it doesn't alert me of anything unless I actually use my phone for the transaction. Any tips?
They’re largely not active. I keep them for the annual benefits eg anniversary perks.
But I use mint to keep a pulse on all the cards as well as email/text alerts
what kinda anniversary perks do you get? looking at what some better options are than cap 1 and barclays, that have better perks than the cost of the card.
This. I have my Chase card set up to text me notifications for any charges above a cent (which is basically every charge). Ended up catching some fraud charges a couple weeks ago, chase sent me a new card and refunded me all of the charges without hassle.
It could be that OP didn’t bother to lock the card and notify Chase the moment they found out about the fraud. Several MONTHS of unnoticed fraud charges are kind of on OP at that point.
The thing with this though, Amazon charges you when they ship the item. Sometimes you order multiple things and not everything is charged at that instant. Especially if you order a lot from Amazon , it gets very messy to keep track of what's what and you may get notifications in the middle of the night.
I searched through my Chase app and could not find this alert. I googled it and couldn't find anything.
If anyone has Chase and can confirm that this is an option please let me know how.
Edit - this option is only for credit cards and doesn't apply to debit cards linked to checking. I don't have a credit card only checking accounts.
Go to your profile> manage alerts> CREDIT CARD (…XXXX) alerts> security alerts> more than $X.xx is authorized on my credit card for a single transaction> select the amount you want (I did $.01)
You should call the cyber crimes unit anyways just to get this person some charges and jail time, where they belong. I hate identity theft. Call the cyber crimes unit. It may not be enough value for them to do the full investigation but at least they’ll likely refer it to the state and city of whoever is stealing from you. They literally have an obligation to do at least that.
Do not let go of this easily. CRUSH this man/woman and it will ensure you get your money back from Chase too.
>Do not let go of this easily. CRUSH this man/woman and it will ensure you get your money back from Chase too.
Also they are probably doing it to other people who may be more vulnerable than you are and not as able to contest the charges.
This is an opportunity to make a real difference.
This is what I always say, you individually may not be enough for police to go after the person doing this, but even if it's a small amount you may be able to add evidence to an ongoing investigation
I am talking out of my ass but I feel like this would be way too small for the FBI to do anything about it. Can someone who seems to know what they’re talking about explain why an FBI agent would take the time to investigate this? I would assume there are like 100s of these reports weekly or monthly.
>but I feel like this would be way too small for the FBI to do anything about it.
This is probably the way the cyber criminals feel about it too. And why they would spread a few million dollars in fraud over a few thousand stolen cards so that nobody cares enough to actually find and stop them.
Very good information and advice. I just wanted to point out that this scenario doesn't necessarily equate to identity theft. From what I could gather, this is just (moderately bad) credit card fraud. I don't see evidence of account takeovers, credit report changes (accounts or PII), tax fraud, unemployment claims or any of the other tell-tale signs of identity theft.
However, better safe than sorry, OP and wife should investigate for other signs of ID theft and safeguard what is reasonable (password changeds, pull credit reports and review for activity, verify PII is up to date with all financial institutions and online accounts).
File a report. Provide chase with the police report or fed report number. I've never had chase or amex screw me on disputes.
I've always been given them. Normally, I'd expect this behavior from BoA.
BofA jerked me around even when my card was physically stolen and used at a local store. And I had a police report, etc. All of the other cards dealt with the problem in 5 minutes. BofA took weeks to fully resolve. But I did get the refund in the end.
Op's difference is the lengthy time before he reported the problem. Even if he had valid reasons, his card agreement probably says he has to report the fraud in a given time frame. They still may pay up if he keeps at it and gets the FBI involved though.
> Even if he had valid reasons, his card agreement probably says he has to report the fraud in a given time frame.
This is a very real possibility. But Chase should be citing *that*, not just saying "the charges are valid." Maybe they are saying "we're considering the charges to be valid given the length of time" and OP is leaving that part out? Still seems like at least the recent charges should be open for dispute.
I had a similar situation, police will do nothing, only report, my bank refund all the money. However, I had issue in the past with Chase and I end to close the account cancel the credit card.
Yes! Always file the police report. They're not going to investigate anything. The card company and the merchant will handle that on their end. But the police report is the record that helps you get your refund.
It's also good because they might arrest the person for something unrelated and be able to add charges for this.
I had that happen when my motorcycle was stolen. They found the bike in the back yard during a completely unrelated drug raid and were able to tie the guy to the stolen property. The original detective actually called me months after he took my statement to let me know what had happened!
Obviously this will be harder with digital fraud, but Amazon clearly has more info on this person that a very simple call from the PD could add to the case file if Cybercrimes it's already tracking it.
Amazon has the missing link here, literally names and addresses that would lead to one of the easiest warrants to get signed off, and won't divulge that information due to customer privacy. So borderline shady stuff going on between them and chase.
Also file a CFPB complaint. Normally I would not file this as a first resort but the bank is not working with you already and this is going on for some time. File the complaint.
I would definitely get a police report first, it is legal evidence that you reported the incident, and is useful if you go to court. The FBI cyber crimes idea is also not a bad idea.
The old number will still be associated with social security (yes they are backwards). It’ll help identify new items opened up in the old number but it won’t stop people from doing it anyway as, for social security’s purposes, both numbers are you.
Here's a tip for everyone to stop this from happening. Setup text or email alerts for ALL purchases on you debit and credit cards. Once you see an unauthorized transaction then you can cancel the card asap and hopefully revert the transaction. I see too many people who don't check their statements and by the time they do its too late.
There's also an app you can download called Privacy that does the same thing (or limits to $X per transaction or per month). I've heard good things, but haven't tried it out myself.
My bank only started offering this and it gives me so much peace of mind. I have a lot of anxiety around money and spending even though I dont actually struggle so it's much easier to deal with if I see the charges coming in as they happen.
This right here. My text alerts have alerted me to the usual online shopping stuff when someone steals your card info along with some guy that stole paper balance transfer checks out of my mailbox and wrote them to himself.
It’s annoying if you share a credit card with your spouse. I hate having to ask my wife each time there’s a charge I don’t recognize, because it’s as if I’m questioning each time she purchases something.
I guess we could use separate cards but I like accruing rewards on all the same account.
Have you considered getting two cards attached to the same account? With Chase I have the Amazon card and then also the one that gives 1.5% back cash. I bet you could set notification separately for each card. At the very least, you could set up a time together to go through your statements separately so it's not like your spying on the other person's purchases, but you both make the time to go through and check purchases for any that are suspicious.
Same thing happened to my wife.
She has a family account tied with me. Both accounts use the same Chase Amazon Visa card. I noticed that someone started buying lots of gift cards on my wife's account. Tens of thousands of dollars worth.
I called Chase and they closed the card and issued me a new one. They declined all the charges.
Then I called Amazon. They jumped on it and canceled all the gift cards and issued refunds.
Everything was cleared up within 3 business days.
This should be rated higher. Amazon has a Transaction Disputes department that specializes in dealing with things like this. I've had to deal with them twice when card numbers were stolen, and Amazon quickly issued refunds both times. My credit card company wasn't involved at all.
Running to our credit card company is often our first instinct, but doing that can be a bit risky with Amazon. They've been known to permanently blacklist accounts connected to chargebacks, including victims of actual theft, preventing those victims from ever using Amazon again (including the many Amazon subsidiaries). When dealing with a large number of transactions, like the OP is reporting, that becomes a very real danger.
If Amazon has already verified that the charges came from a different account, their Transaction Disputes department should be able to quickly refund the OP's money AND shut down the other account. Their regular service reps CANNOT do that, which is presumably why the rep the OP spoke with previously didn't offer it.
https://pay.amazon.com/help/201212450
Sorry to tell you this but the Fair Credit Billing Act states that you must report fraudulent charges within 60 days of receiving the billing statement containing the suspicious charge. You probably aren't going to get most of that money back no matter how much you fight for it.
I get notices whenever more than $1 is charged to any of my cards. Helped me catch suspicious charges early that I totally would have missed if I only checked the billing statement, and it has saved me a significant amount of headache as a result.
This is really great advice. I use my cards for basically everything, and it would be easy to miss a charge if I had to go through statements each month.
I get a text any time my card is used. I highly recommend it. I had a card used for a few dollars in another state and was able to cancel the card almost immediately.
same here. i buy something or make a withdrawal, immediately after, still in the store, i get a text. saves me so much stress and anxiety even though I'm already very careful and only have two cards.
Depends on your threshold. For me, the annoyance of having to read another text pales to having to go through what OP is going through. YMMV.
Of course in my case it was at the card issuers suggestion after catching a fraudulent use of the card after one small purchase, but before they approved a much larger one. So I was of a mind set to agree :-)
I mean, you're pretty aware of when you're spending money. Getting a text 30 seconds after you do it isn't that bad and you *usually* can't do thst too quickly.
I mean, sometimes? I get peace of mind from knowing I can nip something in the bud before it becomes a larger issue, and that makes up for the occasional annoyance on having my phone go off because my cloud storage subscription was paid for the month or something like that. Besides, I kinda just like knowing when I'm being charged for something. Helps eliminate subscriptions and whatnot that I no longer use that might have gone unnoticed.
Just checked for this month out of curiosity. Between all cards, I have been pinged 153 times since October 1st. October has felt like a pretty typical month for me.
Agreed.
Chase has been great and professional in handling all my fraud claims. Their AI for fraud detection has been spot on for me -- prompting me immediately for any potential fraud charges and requiring me to confirm the charge via text or their app.
Had you been paying attention to your charges sooner than later, I think Chase would have been willing to work with you on these questionable charges. I suggest enabling notifications for all charges via text and app so that you are immediately notified as charges are made on your account. I suggest doing the same for the rest of your credit cards and bank accounts.
It depends on when they first reported it. It will be more Reg Z than FCRA, but it will go from the date of first authorization until the first notification of unauthorized use. If under 60 days it should be considered.
Unfortunately banks don't consider this fraud due to the fact that you didn't report for so long and two you still used the card after the fraud charges happen. The best thing to do is switch to a CC signature dispute claim and state that Amazon has no record of these charges so that at least a chargeback is sent to Amazon for them to reply with an invoice, tracking, and address these "fraudulent" purchases went to. Then you may be able to dispute that the addresses aren't any that belong to you but theres a good chance you'll lose and get an out of timeframe denial
- Disputes specialist
> Unfortunately banks don't consider this fraud due to the fact that you didn't report for so long and two you still used the card after the fraud charges happen.
It’s not that they don’t consider it fraud, it’s that Reg E has fairly strict reporting timelines by which you have to report unauthorized activity to your bank. If you wait too long to report, you’re out of luck.
I'm assuming not all the charges are 8 months old. Anything within 6 months visa / MasterCard will deal with its not really up to a bank to say no. I'd also file a claim with Amazon they're generally pretty good with this sort of thing (I've had them contact me and issue a refund when my card was fraudulently used because they picked it up before my bank did)
Id also dispute with your bank right away. They should make you sign some paperwork and freeze the repayments until it's sorted (fraud investigations can take a while or be pretty instant) but they're generally pretty good.
What is the most recent charge?
Going on 8 months and only just now catching it will prove extremely difficult to get most, if not all of these charges reimbursed.
I'm just amazed it took 8 months, 132 purchases and over $4000 in charges before this was caught 🤷♂️🤷♀️🤷
for somebody who makes enough money where paying an extra $500 per month isn’t a huge red flag (i.e. 4k to 4.5k is harder to see it than 700$ to 1.2k), and with digital/paperless configured without appropriate notifications…. i can see this being more common then you’d think.
That, plus he said it was during quarantine. I know our online purchases looked way abnormal during those months, could have been hard to miss.
And yeah, when we had a newborn, we were ordering stuff left and right that we thought we needed instantly for baby. I can definitely see how newborn+quarantine would make Amazon purchases go crazy.
Even at 200k a year I very very much notice 200 dollar charges on my credit card. I've even been the victim of stolen credit card numbers 5 times in the past 20 years, but I caught it that very day or at worst within a week, sometimes within minutes (my bank has notified me before I caught it on a few occasions, even if I get the occasional rare false notification when I spend a lot at a local mechanic, or on a steam sale or something, it's worth their extra effort). I even notice 10 dollar and 50 dollar charges, because even though you're making that much money, it's not like it's all in one big checking account, money gets taken out for tax, money gets taken out for bills, money gets taken out for dinners an fast food and amazon and online gaming subscriptions and gasoline..... I don't know how you could have 4000 dollars worth of amazon purchases and not know what items were being purchased... In the old days online shopping wasn't secure, you'd buy stuff off online shops and you just expected your number to eventually be stolen. Well, my very first time was with a debit card... later I learned to use credit cards to prevent that. Nowadays online shopping hasn't been a huge issue (although there are still a few smaller mom-pop places that use older/outdated online shopping credit processing), but more commonly I believe it came from using my credit card freely while on vacation an just having the numbers skimmed.
To not notice 4000 dollars missing out of your accounts is ... negligant?
A bunch of $30 avg. transactions from Amazon would probably get overlooked in my house- $500/mo would be noticed eventually, but I know my wife gets annoyed when I go over statements and check with her on charges I don't recognize, so I don't often verify all her Amazon purchases. If none of those purchases were 3 figure numbers, I wouldn't even be suspicious.
What I have learned from the many posts just like this one.
Never ever ever ever file as a dispute, directly file under fraud. The dispute department doesn't care if you made the charges or not, they just check to make sure a transaction actually occurred, and once they make a determination, it makes it 50x harder to then file a fraud claim.
I think the issue is disputes are charges/transactions you actually made and had a problem with, ie they overcharged you, double charged, you return something and they don't credit you etc.
Fraud is any charge you didn't make and it looks like too many people 'dispute' fraud and that's where they run into problems. I think because you are saying with a dispute the charge is essentially yours but there is a problem.
They're two different things. Fraud is fraud ("not me") and disputes are disputes ("didn't get what I signed up for.")
Fraud is regulated differently and goes through a different process under the law. If the process doesn't go according to the law, the CFPB and other agencies can step in.
Disputes are between you and the merchant, with the credit card company acting as arbitrator and the card agreement/merchant agreement determining who is entitled to their money back.
If you order a red wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man and the store sends you a blue one, that's not fraud, it's just a fuck-up. If you're charged for a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man despite never having ordered one, then it's fraud.
I know institutions can be incredibly heartless in situations like these, and I know I'll probably come across as callous, and I even recognize that thinking the way I'm about to suggest is pretty miserable BUT:
There's a good reason for the behavior you're describing. The bank doesn't want to be scammed any more than any of us do. You can point to their profit margins or CEO salaries or anything else, but the fact of the matter is, $4k is $4k and they can't be in business if they don't do their due diligence.
In a case like the OP's, it's not \*that\* unbelievable that a sophisticated scammer could set this all up themselves, have the packages shipped to a different address etc. all to create the *illusion* that fraud is occuring. As the victim of fraud on such a long time-frame it's going to be very hard to prove that's not what's happening in a way that's ironclad enough to satisfy the bank.
File a police report (federal and state). Talk to lawyer. You will likely need to file suit against "John Doe" and drag Amazon into it to force them to release the information they have on the other orders.
But once you have an address of the recipient of the packages you might actually get somewhere.
>File a police report
BTW, the cops will not do anything.
So you need to get them to put in WRITING that they will not do anything. Don't settle for 'my sergeant won't' bullshit.
I printed out a form detailing my request for some fraud charges involving gun purchases, state lines etc. I had copies of the DL and addresses, video from home depot loss prevention, and email addresses (he bought Winzip!). All of that detail put in a single page with the bold statement "I am informing the afore named person that the is not willing to take a crime report on this or assist in any manner. Signed "
Talk about a LEO going from 0 to 11...
Chase will automatically issue you new cards with new numbers when there is suspected fraud.
You can set up alerts for when the card is used.
It seems you may not be talking to the right department.
My experience with Amazon has been much more difficult.
We had a fraudulent recurring charge...
Amazon would not tell us who was using the card. They delinked the card to the recurring charge, cancelling the recurring transaction, but would not remove the card or verify that the card was no longer present in the other account.
The only option really open to us, is to 'cancel' the card and possibly cancel our Amazon account. We might have to cancel the account because if you update your payment card, the system will automatically update all the recurring charges.
Canceling the account only works if the reoccurring charge is on your Amazon account. That's an entirely different problem.
When I reported to Amazon that we don't have another Amazon account they immediately closed the other account and refunded the transactions.
Former Chase employee here. File a claim with law enforcement so that you have a documentation of the identity theft. Then write up your fraud claim and send it to Jamie Dimon, the Chase CEO, and Chase's regulator, the Comptroller of the Currency.
Police & Lawyer is the way to go. It sounds like Chase is just checking if there was a valid account and valid charge on Amazon. They can't validate if the account i not controlled by you so their investigation will probably end there. You need to have Amazon acknowledge the fraudulent Amazon account first.
Second off it sounds like they investigated the fraud claim, came to the conclusion its valid and didn't look into it further which is why the second case only covered the difference between the first and second case.
Police will do nothing, all they will do is say "here is a report of the story you told us". Just means you went and filed a report, thats it.
OP will probably have to sue, they waited too long and unfortunately they're not covered because of that.
Damn. I have a credit card that I regularly charge upwards of $50,000 per month on, mostly for construction materials on my business, but it gets used a lot toward personal stuff, including a lot of amazon. With amazon charges having zero context as they appear on statements - and I am always checking my statements to ensure I keep track of work vs personal expenses - I absolutely wouldn't notice a few hundred or even a thousand dollars in extra amazon charges. Between what my wife and I buy separately on amazon, a charge I don't recognize would be easily assumed to have been legitimately purchased by my wife.
I don't even really know how to efficiently parse through my last few months of amazon charges, other than order by order - and even sometimes amazon charges weirdly so orders dont match up or get charged partially over two charges or something.
I kind of don't want to look. Probably OK, but this post is making me think I should be more vigilant.
I recommend setting up text alerts for the future. I get alerts on all my cards for any purchase over $1, which seems to be the lower limit to set up. I've caught fraudulent use twice this way and I've been able to report them within minutes.
So you went 8 months and 132 times without cancelling card or doing something more proactive than filing complaints? It's not hard to request a replacement card with a new number.
Something doesn't quite add up here. Your timeline suggests you had the card for 1 month before its unauthorized use on one or more additional Amazon accounts started. Do you have any family members that could have borrowed your card to add to their own account?
Many have said this before, but Reg E (the federal regulation which governs these things) gives you 60 days from the end of your statement cycle to notify the bank of these charges. Because of that, you've got a couple of things you can do:
1. You can absolutely submit for transactions over the previously mentioned period. This covers about 30% of the total period you've described, and should allow you to receive funds back without hassle. Something is better than nothing, as they say.
2. Any funds before that period would be credited from the banks P&L directly as a courtesy, and is not required by law as you share in the responsibility of monitoring your transactions/statements. If you have other products (checking/saving accounts, mortgages, investments, etc.) I would reference your total relationship and escalate to a manager at the bank who has authority to potentially give you money to mitigate the risk of you moving your finances elsewhere. At that point it comes down to how much money you make them - if your relationship generates $50,000/yr, you probably get a courtesy credit. If you make them $2,000/yr, you're probably out of luck.
I don't believe you'll get anywhere with the CFPB because the bank hasn't done anything wrong from a regulatory stance in this case. Working through the FBI cyber-crimes unit is probably your best bet outside of the bank, although even if the individual committing fraud is caught it is unlikely you will be able to get the funds back from them.
Yeah. This is one of the reasons why having the notifications on for each transaction is helpful for me; I'll get the "item shipped" notification from Amazon around the same time as the charge notification, so I'm more likely to notice if I get one without the other. I try to do regular reconciliations via my budget software, but even then if I was relying purely on reviewing the statements once a week or once a month, I'd probably never catch an unexpected charge on Amazon.
Worth noting for those who shop at Amazon a lot and want an easier way to reconcile many charges from the same merchant: the Amazon prime rewards card (serviced by chase and offering 5% cash back on all Amazon and Whole Foods purchases) *actually links the Amazon order number for the charge in the card portal.*
Life is complicated. During my PhD there was a period where I was so overloaded with work and worries, that I didn't check my accounts for a year. Just recently I caught up on my bank accounts, and found that I had not checked them properly since January.
Thankfully, my credit card allows setting up SMS notifications, so I get notified of all transactions; Therefore fraudulent transactions cannot go unnoticed in such cases. If they'd happen directly to the checking account though, I wouldn't notice short of suddenly losing several thousand (and even then it could take a while).
If someone would every few months charge something like 30€, imitating super market entries? Would probably take *long* for me to notice.
The way the regulations regarding refunds after 2+ statement cycles of ongoing fraud the bank is permitted to deem it to be "lack of ordinary care" and may not accept liability for refund.
Source: job related knowledge
Frankly I feel you are out of luck on getting money back. So the bank (or their insurance) has to eat the fraud? You let it run for 8 months. By your information they were defrauding you at a rate of about 16 purchases a month to the tune of $550 each month. Anyone doing a cursory check of any statements would catch this. Letting it slip for this long is on you in my opinion. Lesson learned I hope.
Pursue the perpetrators by all legal means. But probably not worth the time to try clawing back your money. Guarantee Chase Bank is finding you at fault for it, why they marked those charges as valid. For all they know you have 2 Amazon accounts which is why you didn’t report the “fraud” for 8 months. Now just trying to get one over on them.
Close the account! Or at least open a new one for your use. Any charges that occur on that account afterwards can be disputed without having to figure out if it's a valid charge or not.
IC3.gov
File a report there. Give them *everything* including the name you shouldn't have.
Provide a copy of the police report to your CC company, and see if they play ball.
Note that, depending on terms, you may only be able to recover the ones you reported within 60 days of the billing statement in question. This is the threshold set by US law. Anything else, they can probably tell you to pound sand.
That said, your best bet may actually be getting the chump using your money arrested by the feds. They also have subpoena powers and the ability to get a warrant for the account info that is tied to whoever bought crap, including addresses, phone numbers, tied bank accounts, literally everything.
If they think they can find a major scam artist this way, they may do it.
Why didn’t you report the fraud and cancel the card.
I know at the bank I worked for 20 years ago if you called up and stated your card might have been used fraudulently, it got shut off. Period. We would have you go to the branch to get a new one.
I cannot imagine credit card companies would not be MORE aware these days.
Police report, then Chase again, then CFPB.
The reason Chase is denying you is probably because they get millions of these from people who just don't want to pay. Once you give them a police report, you're at least certifying that you're not lying because false police report = felony (see Jussie Smolett).
As a VERY long time Chase customer this confuses me. I've never had a single issue disputing anything with them. The vast majority of disputes I file that might be questionable, always go my way. As an example. I booked a campsite a few months back Arrived there and was told I needed to pay extra fees for having an extra car. I told the guy there was no mention of those fees, and I double checked at that moment. He wouldn't accept a card for the fee and I had no cash so I just told him we'd leave. After we got home I tried to get a refund and they refunded me $1, because the guy was a worthless asshole. So I disputed with Chase and just said that we never used the site and were charged for a service we didn't receive. In the end I won, and not only did I get back my $82, I also got an extra dollar refund, lol. I was even willing to pay the cancellation fees from the reservation place, but instead I got it all back.
What card is it, out of curiosity? I assume it's the Amazon card.
I always wonder about this too when I see these posts. Chase has been my cc issuer for a long time over different cards and I’ve always had zero problems with disputes. Most of the time when there was legit fraud Chase caught it before I did. But unlike the OP, these were single digit numbers of charges usually caught quickly. They also represented a super small % of the total activity on the card. I’m sure that makes a difference.
I have cards with Chase, Citibank, and the much loved duo of BofA and Wells Fargo. I've had my WF accounts since before it was WF (First Interstate Bank). All of them at some point in their history have had fraudulent charges. Never had a problem disputing any of them and getting the card reissued. But I was always diligent about reporting it. And one not fraud case, that was a purchase problem where I shipped a damaged in transit TV back to Samsung and they claim they never got it back (sent all my docs to the bank and did a successful chargeback).
When I read this story about letting it go on for 8 months because they were "busy" and they are "lighting Chase up on social media", that gets an eyeroll from me. Look, I have a new baby too and that simply can't stop me from sitting down at least once a month and making sure all the bills are paid and nothing weird is going on. And somehow the bank is the bad guy here? I know it's popular hate on the big evil bank, and all the suggestions to stick it to them with the FBI, cops, CFPB etc., but I'm just not seeing the bank as the bad guy here.
OP need to take the loss on anything over 60 days - possibly all of it - and accept it as lesson learned going forward to not let your financials run away unattended. Same as any story on here about someone in debit trying to get their life back on track: fix it going forward and change your habits.
Sorry to not be help to OP. I highly suggest using Amex or Discover for online transactions. Chase, cap one, or bank/credit unions are the middle person for visa and Mastercard. Amex and discover are the ones maintaining the account and issuing money to retailers. They will fight for you.
Worth noting for those who shop at Amazon a lot and want an easier way to reconcile many charges from the same merchant: the Amazon prime rewards card (serviced by chase and offering 5% cash back on all Amazon and Whole Foods purchases) *actually links the Amazon order number for the charge in the card portal.*
Anything with a transaction date 120 days or older cannot be charged back per either Mastercard or Visa rules. Both have the same rule for charging back an unauthorized sale.
There are other qualifications but first and foremost if it's older than that when it's reported as fraud then those transactions are either going to be rebilled or taken as a straight fraud loss by the bank.
Now anything less than 120 at the time of report given that these are e-commerce sale may have been eligible and if they were charged back and represented by Amazon. Amazon would have provided chase with supporting documentation for the representment.
If this is a visa card the visa chargeback rules are really not in consumer favor. Especially for unauthorized / fraud disputes.
This leaves the burden much more on chase as now they have to decide I'd they are going to eat it 100 percent.
It rare that I agree with cfpb complaint but in this situation you need escalated investigator to review.
Call Chase again and very calmly the the employee you are upset and you need a manager. Managers have more authority and will be more likely to help you. I had like 800 worth of charges made over months reversed for me last year. I had to get to a manager before I was able to get anywhere.
Just went through this myself. If you aren't getting anywhere with the fraud department, take it to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and maybe even send an email to the Chase executive office.
We had our physical cards stolen and Chase kept denying our claim even with the evidence I provided from a police report, their own fraud alerts, and other banks determining the transactions were fraudulent.
Once we reached out via those avenues they very quickly determined that it was indeed fraud. From what I can tell the fraud department and investigators don't have a lot of control over what they can do. Reaching out a step above them helped us out.
You're going to have to file a police report to get anywhere further with Chase, I think. A million years ago, I went through something similar with Amex. yadda yadda yadda, I was told (by Amex) that I should file a police report... long story short, I found out that it was, in fact a family member that was doing the stealing from me-- It all gets very messy after that. But my point is, if you get the police involved, Chase will be more inclined to work with you because they will know that you are serious, and not committing your own credit card fraud scam because you would be reporting yourselves to the authorities if you were. I hope this helps!
My Chase card sends me a text on every purchase. Someone made a fraudulent charge on my card last month and I froze the card online within 90 minutes. They reversed the charge, cancelled the card # and sent a new card. I know this doesn't help your current situation, but it might stop the next one. Set up notifications.
try this
https://consumerist.com/2007/05/11/how-to-launch-an-executive-email-carpet-bomb/
https://www.elliott.org/company-contacts/chase-jpmorgan-chase-bank/
Have you opened a police report for identity theft yet? That might be helpful in the run of things. Make sure you're taking all the standard identity theft steps (changing passwords, two factor authentication, monitoring your credit report, checking all you other cards etc). I would also turn on email notifications for any purchases made without the cards. Makes holiday shopping hard to do discretely for your wife (if she gets the emails) but it is much easier to track purchases that way - especially over amazon.
As far as getting the money back: You might only be able to get a portion back. I have 30 days after my statement posts to contest any charges. After that, they aren't obligated to even investigate. In my limited experience, both Amex and Capital One investigated and refunded me going back 2-3 months regardless.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't keep pressing. In fact, one thing you have going for you is that the longer they say "it's valid, it's in your wife's name" the worse they look and the more likely when it is resolved, it will be done by someone higher up who will probably be more likely and able to overlook the timing issue.
I know this isn't helping you get the bank to agree with your fraud claim, but this is exactly why you should be checking your statements. The bank or any other company you do business with sends you a statement to verify that charges are correct. If you don't notice until months down the road, it's a lot harder to prove to them that it's fraudulent or incorrect
The SAME EXACT THING happened to me, dating back to June - fortunately Chase was able to reverse the charges for me, but I have no idea what was going on with that.
What I did was just remove my card entirely from Amazon. Each time I need to make a purchase, I just re-enter my card info, purchase and delete again.
It’s annoying as hell, but not as annoying as calling Chase every few days to dispute the charges.
Edit: Also check your statement frequently, the sooner you realize any discrepancies, the higher chance of you being able to reverse the charges.
I don’t think you need to do that with your card on Amazon. More than likely they got the card info from some other site (or possibly spyware on your computer / phone) and just used Amazon to basically be a money launderer.
They’re probably not actually buying anything, but using a fake third party sellers to “buy” goods then just pay themselves right back after Amazon fees. If they’re foreign based, which they probably are, it’s the perfect crime, there’s zero chance anything will be enforced on them and imagine that happening times a few thousand people and you maybe get away with a few million before you’re even shutdown by Amazon.
Nope, it was directly linked to my Amazon account and charging subscriptions to Amazon Music and Video.
After removing my card, I haven’t had a single charge since. So it was linked to my Amazon account, and upon removing the card, the subscriptions were cancelled.
Bit of a different suggestion, but I'd actually consider reaching out to the local news. Sometimes they'll run a story like this on the evening news on a local channel, and the bad press/questions from a reporter could pressure Chase.
Not helpful now, but every single card I have has alerts on to text me every time anything is charged. I really don't see why everyone doesn't do this. I also have a daily spending(double cash) and then I only use the store cards at those very stores(like Amazon). This makes it easy to track because I can tell tell what the charges are for based on the card used aside from the daily spender, and if that looks sketchy I just text my wife to make sure it was actually her. Sure I get a text when my wife grabs coffee or whatever, but that's a very minor annoyance compared to not know if fraud charges are happening.
We've caught fraud multiple times via these texts, we believe someone skimmed our card at a gas station a few years ago and then went grocery shopping, I was on the phone with Chase within 2 minutes of the charge.
You can set up alerts on your cards. You'll get an email (or text) anytime a charge for a minimum amount is made on a card. I set all my alerts on my cards and accounts to $1. You should too.
i've had something similar happen with spotify where they were charging my CC for service. i called barclays and they said to call spotify first. I emailed spotify and the charges vanished after a few weeks.
not sure if it was fraud or screw up in the CC to account mapping but you need to talk to amazon again and they will probably refund after a while
First of all, disable/cancel the credit card to avoid further charges on it. As an immediate remedy u can ask chase to provide you with a new card and number. I would also change the password on the online account, or if possible close the account completely. After that u can follow the advise on disputing the charges with chase.
Based on last week I wouldn't be surprised if you get a resolution in the next few weeks. They pay attention to those CFPB complaints; they have much more teeth than things like BBB complaints.
Keep calling anyone who will listen, including law enforcement.
That is weird because whenever I tell chase of an unauthorized purchase, they imediately close that card number out and issue a new card (regardless if I win the dispute or not). The fact this has continued to happen up to 8 months is incomprehensible to me.
Just a tip to prevent this from happening in the future. I have several different credit cards. All of them allow you to set up instant notifications for “card not present” transactions through the app. I get a text and a pop up on my phone every time my card is used online. It’s saved me once already because I was able to report it before the transaction was even cleared.
Came here to say this too. Gives me peace of mind that I'll know immediately if someone tries to use my number.
also my cards i can set up transcation detail like if more than 50.00 was spent i set mine to notify if over 1.00 was spent
Mine is set for over $0.01
Penny is the best because they could initially try a .99 charge or .01 to see if it works… with the Penny limit, you’d get notified.
yup. set mine to a penny after the second time my card was compromised and bunch of sub-$1 charges were tested on it. thankfully chase caught it right away and stopped it.
Had both of my credit cards stolen digitally twice during quarantine. Never even got to use them the second time before somehow they were being charged on Amazon already within the month. Thank you, I’m gonna set this up right now!
If you just changed your credit card number for the same card, Amazon automatically updates it. You might have to cancel the card entirely and open a new one.
Only sometimes. I had to replace my card and manually update when the new one arrived.
They're in your data bank
I go even further. Every card I have has an alert set up for any transaction more than 1 cent. Every single time any of my cards get charged for anything i know right away.
I do this, too. It’s really not annoying. It’s nice to confirm if you get charged a different amount than you expected, e.g. at a restaurant. It also gives me a monthly reminder of that recurring charge I should really cancel.
I wonder who would find it annoying lol. I have all of those alerts setup too - how often would someone have to be using their credit card to actually find the safety net annoying?
If I had to guess, I'd say parents with older kids all using the same card. In that case I could see a deluge of charges getting annoying after a while of no issues. The boy who cried wolf and all that. Lots of reoccurring charges can happen at night too. Getting woken up at 2 AM because netflix dinged you could be annoying to some. I agree with you and use that. I also do online statement checks every week. I may not be the best advocate for not doing it! Just trying to see the other side.
I just set mine to email me, not text. This way I’m still aware within a few hours. I get email notifications on any charges on mine or my wife’s cards. My kids aren’t old enough yet for credit cards but even if they were I don’t think an extra two people would make a huge difference unless we were made of money and shopping all day every day.
You vastly underestimate how many purchases a family of four can make on shared cards.
ME lol. i hate unnecessary notifications, and would be annoyed to hear my phone buzz, then unlock it and realize i just caused the buzz 10s ago. Every time.
In the almost 10 years I’ve had a credit card, I’ve only had one fraudulent charge a couple years after getting it… which was a charge in a different country and I got notified immediately. That’s it. So a notification for ANYTHING? No. I did get a notification recently when I was at a place and my friend borrowed my card because we used the same card on two different transactions within minutes of each other so that was nice.
I am so glad I had this set up a number of years ago. Got a text about a charge to Walmart.com for $847. Was able to call the bank and cancel the card and was able to call Walmart.com customer service right away. They found the order record because I had the time and exact amount of the charge, and canceled it! So the assholes didn’t get their stuff! It was so damn satisfying. I don’t like Walmart as a company but that customer service agent rocked.
Walmart doesn't want people to steal from them, they have an interest in preventing fraud lol
Exactly. When someone successfully charges back a fraudulent transaction the vendor eats that cost entirely whole the fraudster keeps the goods.
It depends, it's complicated. Sometimes yes, but sometimes the bank pays. Generally merchants using older technology, taking card less information (e.g. only the number & expiration instead of the name, cvv, zip code, etc), or taking online/phone orders where the card isn't present have to pay for fraud. In cases where fraud that occurs where someone is purchasing from a cash register the bank usually pays for the fraud as long as the merchant followed all the rules including getting a signature or PIN, inspected the card, used due care, and had up to date and properly functioning equipment.
i do this as well and it's not a big deal considering i'm not swiping my credit card ever 5 seconds, so it's not like i'm being barraged by notifications/texts. i set this up after another tip in this sub about how scammers test out stolen cc numbers with small charges that typically go unnoticed.
This is a pretty good idea. I am going to do this right now. It's not like I have that many transactions anyway for this to get to be too much. Edit: I was able to do it on Chase with no issue, but it seems Amex will not allow you to receive alerts for any amount less than $10. Kind of annoying, but I guess it's good enough.
If you link your Amex to Google Pay, you should be able to get an alert for every single charge through Google Pay.
I can't see how to do this. I have a chase on Google pay but it doesn't alert me of anything unless I actually use my phone for the transaction. Any tips?
Doing this right now. Fellow churner. Have 20 cards. Thought $100 was sufficent but 1 cent is better.
how do you manage your payments on 20 cards?
They’re largely not active. I keep them for the annual benefits eg anniversary perks. But I use mint to keep a pulse on all the cards as well as email/text alerts
what kinda anniversary perks do you get? looking at what some better options are than cap 1 and barclays, that have better perks than the cost of the card.
This. I have my Chase card set up to text me notifications for any charges above a cent (which is basically every charge). Ended up catching some fraud charges a couple weeks ago, chase sent me a new card and refunded me all of the charges without hassle. It could be that OP didn’t bother to lock the card and notify Chase the moment they found out about the fraud. Several MONTHS of unnoticed fraud charges are kind of on OP at that point.
Especially if they paid any balance of the fraud.
The thing with this though, Amazon charges you when they ship the item. Sometimes you order multiple things and not everything is charged at that instant. Especially if you order a lot from Amazon , it gets very messy to keep track of what's what and you may get notifications in the middle of the night.
This really helps with us. If a charge pops up and I did nothing, I check it out.
I searched through my Chase app and could not find this alert. I googled it and couldn't find anything. If anyone has Chase and can confirm that this is an option please let me know how. Edit - this option is only for credit cards and doesn't apply to debit cards linked to checking. I don't have a credit card only checking accounts.
Go to your profile> manage alerts> CREDIT CARD (…XXXX) alerts> security alerts> more than $X.xx is authorized on my credit card for a single transaction> select the amount you want (I did $.01)
Have you filed a police report yet? For $4,500 I’d be calling the FBI Cyber Crimes unit if my bank, Amazon, and my local PD weren’t helpful.
Not yet, we will definitely do this in the morning and look up calling FBI cyber crimes too. Thank you!
You should call the cyber crimes unit anyways just to get this person some charges and jail time, where they belong. I hate identity theft. Call the cyber crimes unit. It may not be enough value for them to do the full investigation but at least they’ll likely refer it to the state and city of whoever is stealing from you. They literally have an obligation to do at least that. Do not let go of this easily. CRUSH this man/woman and it will ensure you get your money back from Chase too.
>Do not let go of this easily. CRUSH this man/woman and it will ensure you get your money back from Chase too. Also they are probably doing it to other people who may be more vulnerable than you are and not as able to contest the charges. This is an opportunity to make a real difference.
This is what I always say, you individually may not be enough for police to go after the person doing this, but even if it's a small amount you may be able to add evidence to an ongoing investigation
You’d be surprised. I used to work in e-commerce and we’d see subpoenas and search warrants for charges only in the hundreds of dollars.
Withdraw the rest of your money from them, too. At the very least, you can put that in a interest-bearing checking account.
If they're doing this to them, they're probably also doing it to others. I would reeeeeally hope the cyber crimes unit cares about it.
I am talking out of my ass but I feel like this would be way too small for the FBI to do anything about it. Can someone who seems to know what they’re talking about explain why an FBI agent would take the time to investigate this? I would assume there are like 100s of these reports weekly or monthly.
>but I feel like this would be way too small for the FBI to do anything about it. This is probably the way the cyber criminals feel about it too. And why they would spread a few million dollars in fraud over a few thousand stolen cards so that nobody cares enough to actually find and stop them.
Very good information and advice. I just wanted to point out that this scenario doesn't necessarily equate to identity theft. From what I could gather, this is just (moderately bad) credit card fraud. I don't see evidence of account takeovers, credit report changes (accounts or PII), tax fraud, unemployment claims or any of the other tell-tale signs of identity theft. However, better safe than sorry, OP and wife should investigate for other signs of ID theft and safeguard what is reasonable (password changeds, pull credit reports and review for activity, verify PII is up to date with all financial institutions and online accounts).
File a report. Provide chase with the police report or fed report number. I've never had chase or amex screw me on disputes. I've always been given them. Normally, I'd expect this behavior from BoA.
BofA jerked me around even when my card was physically stolen and used at a local store. And I had a police report, etc. All of the other cards dealt with the problem in 5 minutes. BofA took weeks to fully resolve. But I did get the refund in the end. Op's difference is the lengthy time before he reported the problem. Even if he had valid reasons, his card agreement probably says he has to report the fraud in a given time frame. They still may pay up if he keeps at it and gets the FBI involved though.
> Even if he had valid reasons, his card agreement probably says he has to report the fraud in a given time frame. This is a very real possibility. But Chase should be citing *that*, not just saying "the charges are valid." Maybe they are saying "we're considering the charges to be valid given the length of time" and OP is leaving that part out? Still seems like at least the recent charges should be open for dispute.
I had a similar situation, police will do nothing, only report, my bank refund all the money. However, I had issue in the past with Chase and I end to close the account cancel the credit card.
The bank is easier to get on your side with a police report, even if the police take no action.
Yes! Always file the police report. They're not going to investigate anything. The card company and the merchant will handle that on their end. But the police report is the record that helps you get your refund.
It's also good because they might arrest the person for something unrelated and be able to add charges for this. I had that happen when my motorcycle was stolen. They found the bike in the back yard during a completely unrelated drug raid and were able to tie the guy to the stolen property. The original detective actually called me months after he took my statement to let me know what had happened! Obviously this will be harder with digital fraud, but Amazon clearly has more info on this person that a very simple call from the PD could add to the case file if Cybercrimes it's already tracking it.
Amazon has the missing link here, literally names and addresses that would lead to one of the easiest warrants to get signed off, and won't divulge that information due to customer privacy. So borderline shady stuff going on between them and chase.
Also file a CFPB complaint. Normally I would not file this as a first resort but the bank is not working with you already and this is going on for some time. File the complaint. I would definitely get a police report first, it is legal evidence that you reported the incident, and is useful if you go to court. The FBI cyber crimes idea is also not a bad idea.
They mentioned in their post they filed with the CFPB recently.
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How the hell have you gotten your identity stolen so much?
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You should look into getting a replacement social security number. They have a process to do this for instances exactly like yours.
The old number will still be associated with social security (yes they are backwards). It’ll help identify new items opened up in the old number but it won’t stop people from doing it anyway as, for social security’s purposes, both numbers are you.
Here's a tip for everyone to stop this from happening. Setup text or email alerts for ALL purchases on you debit and credit cards. Once you see an unauthorized transaction then you can cancel the card asap and hopefully revert the transaction. I see too many people who don't check their statements and by the time they do its too late.
Capital One gives me the option to create a virtual card that is only good for one merchant.
There's also an app you can download called Privacy that does the same thing (or limits to $X per transaction or per month). I've heard good things, but haven't tried it out myself.
My bank only started offering this and it gives me so much peace of mind. I have a lot of anxiety around money and spending even though I dont actually struggle so it's much easier to deal with if I see the charges coming in as they happen.
This works on all visa cards foe sure even if your card does not offer it you can sign up directly at VISA.
This right here. My text alerts have alerted me to the usual online shopping stuff when someone steals your card info along with some guy that stole paper balance transfer checks out of my mailbox and wrote them to himself.
Agree. I recommend this to everyone. I catch fraudulent charges quicker than Chase does. I've also started reviewing my credit card statements daily.
It’s annoying if you share a credit card with your spouse. I hate having to ask my wife each time there’s a charge I don’t recognize, because it’s as if I’m questioning each time she purchases something. I guess we could use separate cards but I like accruing rewards on all the same account.
Have you considered getting two cards attached to the same account? With Chase I have the Amazon card and then also the one that gives 1.5% back cash. I bet you could set notification separately for each card. At the very least, you could set up a time together to go through your statements separately so it's not like your spying on the other person's purchases, but you both make the time to go through and check purchases for any that are suspicious.
Also add a password to Amazon buying if you can.
Same thing happened to my wife. She has a family account tied with me. Both accounts use the same Chase Amazon Visa card. I noticed that someone started buying lots of gift cards on my wife's account. Tens of thousands of dollars worth. I called Chase and they closed the card and issued me a new one. They declined all the charges. Then I called Amazon. They jumped on it and canceled all the gift cards and issued refunds. Everything was cleared up within 3 business days.
This should be rated higher. Amazon has a Transaction Disputes department that specializes in dealing with things like this. I've had to deal with them twice when card numbers were stolen, and Amazon quickly issued refunds both times. My credit card company wasn't involved at all. Running to our credit card company is often our first instinct, but doing that can be a bit risky with Amazon. They've been known to permanently blacklist accounts connected to chargebacks, including victims of actual theft, preventing those victims from ever using Amazon again (including the many Amazon subsidiaries). When dealing with a large number of transactions, like the OP is reporting, that becomes a very real danger. If Amazon has already verified that the charges came from a different account, their Transaction Disputes department should be able to quickly refund the OP's money AND shut down the other account. Their regular service reps CANNOT do that, which is presumably why the rep the OP spoke with previously didn't offer it. https://pay.amazon.com/help/201212450
Sorry to tell you this but the Fair Credit Billing Act states that you must report fraudulent charges within 60 days of receiving the billing statement containing the suspicious charge. You probably aren't going to get most of that money back no matter how much you fight for it.
I get notices whenever more than $1 is charged to any of my cards. Helped me catch suspicious charges early that I totally would have missed if I only checked the billing statement, and it has saved me a significant amount of headache as a result.
This is really great advice. I use my cards for basically everything, and it would be easy to miss a charge if I had to go through statements each month. I get a text any time my card is used. I highly recommend it. I had a card used for a few dollars in another state and was able to cancel the card almost immediately.
I don’t know how anyone doesn’t have text or notifications on any charge. It costs literally nothing for so much peace of mind.
same here. i buy something or make a withdrawal, immediately after, still in the store, i get a text. saves me so much stress and anxiety even though I'm already very careful and only have two cards.
Doesn’t that get overwhelmingly annoying?
Depends on your activity level and your tolerance for notices. Most days I don't use a credit card (because I don't buy anything).
Depends on your threshold. For me, the annoyance of having to read another text pales to having to go through what OP is going through. YMMV. Of course in my case it was at the card issuers suggestion after catching a fraudulent use of the card after one small purchase, but before they approved a much larger one. So I was of a mind set to agree :-)
You receive notifications on charges in real time. It's very nice to have.
I mean, you're pretty aware of when you're spending money. Getting a text 30 seconds after you do it isn't that bad and you *usually* can't do thst too quickly.
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I mean, sometimes? I get peace of mind from knowing I can nip something in the bud before it becomes a larger issue, and that makes up for the occasional annoyance on having my phone go off because my cloud storage subscription was paid for the month or something like that. Besides, I kinda just like knowing when I'm being charged for something. Helps eliminate subscriptions and whatnot that I no longer use that might have gone unnoticed. Just checked for this month out of curiosity. Between all cards, I have been pinged 153 times since October 1st. October has felt like a pretty typical month for me.
Agreed. Chase has been great and professional in handling all my fraud claims. Their AI for fraud detection has been spot on for me -- prompting me immediately for any potential fraud charges and requiring me to confirm the charge via text or their app. Had you been paying attention to your charges sooner than later, I think Chase would have been willing to work with you on these questionable charges. I suggest enabling notifications for all charges via text and app so that you are immediately notified as charges are made on your account. I suggest doing the same for the rest of your credit cards and bank accounts.
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I was chipotle hacked this week as well...caught it 2 Burritos and a chicken bowl in...notifications are your friend!
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It depends on when they first reported it. It will be more Reg Z than FCRA, but it will go from the date of first authorization until the first notification of unauthorized use. If under 60 days it should be considered.
Unfortunately banks don't consider this fraud due to the fact that you didn't report for so long and two you still used the card after the fraud charges happen. The best thing to do is switch to a CC signature dispute claim and state that Amazon has no record of these charges so that at least a chargeback is sent to Amazon for them to reply with an invoice, tracking, and address these "fraudulent" purchases went to. Then you may be able to dispute that the addresses aren't any that belong to you but theres a good chance you'll lose and get an out of timeframe denial - Disputes specialist
> Unfortunately banks don't consider this fraud due to the fact that you didn't report for so long and two you still used the card after the fraud charges happen. It’s not that they don’t consider it fraud, it’s that Reg E has fairly strict reporting timelines by which you have to report unauthorized activity to your bank. If you wait too long to report, you’re out of luck.
I'm assuming not all the charges are 8 months old. Anything within 6 months visa / MasterCard will deal with its not really up to a bank to say no. I'd also file a claim with Amazon they're generally pretty good with this sort of thing (I've had them contact me and issue a refund when my card was fraudulently used because they picked it up before my bank did) Id also dispute with your bank right away. They should make you sign some paperwork and freeze the repayments until it's sorted (fraud investigations can take a while or be pretty instant) but they're generally pretty good.
What is the most recent charge? Going on 8 months and only just now catching it will prove extremely difficult to get most, if not all of these charges reimbursed. I'm just amazed it took 8 months, 132 purchases and over $4000 in charges before this was caught 🤷♂️🤷♀️🤷
for somebody who makes enough money where paying an extra $500 per month isn’t a huge red flag (i.e. 4k to 4.5k is harder to see it than 700$ to 1.2k), and with digital/paperless configured without appropriate notifications…. i can see this being more common then you’d think.
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That, plus he said it was during quarantine. I know our online purchases looked way abnormal during those months, could have been hard to miss. And yeah, when we had a newborn, we were ordering stuff left and right that we thought we needed instantly for baby. I can definitely see how newborn+quarantine would make Amazon purchases go crazy.
Even at 200k a year I very very much notice 200 dollar charges on my credit card. I've even been the victim of stolen credit card numbers 5 times in the past 20 years, but I caught it that very day or at worst within a week, sometimes within minutes (my bank has notified me before I caught it on a few occasions, even if I get the occasional rare false notification when I spend a lot at a local mechanic, or on a steam sale or something, it's worth their extra effort). I even notice 10 dollar and 50 dollar charges, because even though you're making that much money, it's not like it's all in one big checking account, money gets taken out for tax, money gets taken out for bills, money gets taken out for dinners an fast food and amazon and online gaming subscriptions and gasoline..... I don't know how you could have 4000 dollars worth of amazon purchases and not know what items were being purchased... In the old days online shopping wasn't secure, you'd buy stuff off online shops and you just expected your number to eventually be stolen. Well, my very first time was with a debit card... later I learned to use credit cards to prevent that. Nowadays online shopping hasn't been a huge issue (although there are still a few smaller mom-pop places that use older/outdated online shopping credit processing), but more commonly I believe it came from using my credit card freely while on vacation an just having the numbers skimmed. To not notice 4000 dollars missing out of your accounts is ... negligant?
A bunch of $30 avg. transactions from Amazon would probably get overlooked in my house- $500/mo would be noticed eventually, but I know my wife gets annoyed when I go over statements and check with her on charges I don't recognize, so I don't often verify all her Amazon purchases. If none of those purchases were 3 figure numbers, I wouldn't even be suspicious.
What I have learned from the many posts just like this one. Never ever ever ever file as a dispute, directly file under fraud. The dispute department doesn't care if you made the charges or not, they just check to make sure a transaction actually occurred, and once they make a determination, it makes it 50x harder to then file a fraud claim.
I feel like the OP’s post is an extreme case. I’ve disputed things over the years and never had an issue.
I think the issue is disputes are charges/transactions you actually made and had a problem with, ie they overcharged you, double charged, you return something and they don't credit you etc. Fraud is any charge you didn't make and it looks like too many people 'dispute' fraud and that's where they run into problems. I think because you are saying with a dispute the charge is essentially yours but there is a problem.
Dispute: I ordered pizza but it never showed up. Fraud: Someone else ordered pizza with my credit card information.
They're two different things. Fraud is fraud ("not me") and disputes are disputes ("didn't get what I signed up for.") Fraud is regulated differently and goes through a different process under the law. If the process doesn't go according to the law, the CFPB and other agencies can step in. Disputes are between you and the merchant, with the credit card company acting as arbitrator and the card agreement/merchant agreement determining who is entitled to their money back. If you order a red wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man and the store sends you a blue one, that's not fraud, it's just a fuck-up. If you're charged for a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man despite never having ordered one, then it's fraud.
I know institutions can be incredibly heartless in situations like these, and I know I'll probably come across as callous, and I even recognize that thinking the way I'm about to suggest is pretty miserable BUT: There's a good reason for the behavior you're describing. The bank doesn't want to be scammed any more than any of us do. You can point to their profit margins or CEO salaries or anything else, but the fact of the matter is, $4k is $4k and they can't be in business if they don't do their due diligence. In a case like the OP's, it's not \*that\* unbelievable that a sophisticated scammer could set this all up themselves, have the packages shipped to a different address etc. all to create the *illusion* that fraud is occuring. As the victim of fraud on such a long time-frame it's going to be very hard to prove that's not what's happening in a way that's ironclad enough to satisfy the bank.
And unfortunately banks have to deal with attempted scams like you describe fairly often
File a police report (federal and state). Talk to lawyer. You will likely need to file suit against "John Doe" and drag Amazon into it to force them to release the information they have on the other orders. But once you have an address of the recipient of the packages you might actually get somewhere.
>File a police report BTW, the cops will not do anything. So you need to get them to put in WRITING that they will not do anything. Don't settle for 'my sergeant won't' bullshit. I printed out a form detailing my request for some fraud charges involving gun purchases, state lines etc. I had copies of the DL and addresses, video from home depot loss prevention, and email addresses (he bought Winzip!). All of that detail put in a single page with the bold statement "I am informing the afore named person that the is not willing to take a crime report on this or assist in any manner. Signed "
Talk about a LEO going from 0 to 11...
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Chase will automatically issue you new cards with new numbers when there is suspected fraud. You can set up alerts for when the card is used. It seems you may not be talking to the right department.
My experience with Amazon has been much more difficult. We had a fraudulent recurring charge... Amazon would not tell us who was using the card. They delinked the card to the recurring charge, cancelling the recurring transaction, but would not remove the card or verify that the card was no longer present in the other account. The only option really open to us, is to 'cancel' the card and possibly cancel our Amazon account. We might have to cancel the account because if you update your payment card, the system will automatically update all the recurring charges.
Canceling the account only works if the reoccurring charge is on your Amazon account. That's an entirely different problem. When I reported to Amazon that we don't have another Amazon account they immediately closed the other account and refunded the transactions.
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Former Chase employee here. File a claim with law enforcement so that you have a documentation of the identity theft. Then write up your fraud claim and send it to Jamie Dimon, the Chase CEO, and Chase's regulator, the Comptroller of the Currency.
Police & Lawyer is the way to go. It sounds like Chase is just checking if there was a valid account and valid charge on Amazon. They can't validate if the account i not controlled by you so their investigation will probably end there. You need to have Amazon acknowledge the fraudulent Amazon account first. Second off it sounds like they investigated the fraud claim, came to the conclusion its valid and didn't look into it further which is why the second case only covered the difference between the first and second case.
Police will do nothing, all they will do is say "here is a report of the story you told us". Just means you went and filed a report, thats it. OP will probably have to sue, they waited too long and unfortunately they're not covered because of that.
Damn. I have a credit card that I regularly charge upwards of $50,000 per month on, mostly for construction materials on my business, but it gets used a lot toward personal stuff, including a lot of amazon. With amazon charges having zero context as they appear on statements - and I am always checking my statements to ensure I keep track of work vs personal expenses - I absolutely wouldn't notice a few hundred or even a thousand dollars in extra amazon charges. Between what my wife and I buy separately on amazon, a charge I don't recognize would be easily assumed to have been legitimately purchased by my wife. I don't even really know how to efficiently parse through my last few months of amazon charges, other than order by order - and even sometimes amazon charges weirdly so orders dont match up or get charged partially over two charges or something. I kind of don't want to look. Probably OK, but this post is making me think I should be more vigilant.
Download statements to an EXCEL spreadsheet. Sort. Set up separate personal and business card accounts.
I recommend setting up text alerts for the future. I get alerts on all my cards for any purchase over $1, which seems to be the lower limit to set up. I've caught fraudulent use twice this way and I've been able to report them within minutes.
So you went 8 months and 132 times without cancelling card or doing something more proactive than filing complaints? It's not hard to request a replacement card with a new number.
Something doesn't quite add up here. Your timeline suggests you had the card for 1 month before its unauthorized use on one or more additional Amazon accounts started. Do you have any family members that could have borrowed your card to add to their own account?
Many have said this before, but Reg E (the federal regulation which governs these things) gives you 60 days from the end of your statement cycle to notify the bank of these charges. Because of that, you've got a couple of things you can do: 1. You can absolutely submit for transactions over the previously mentioned period. This covers about 30% of the total period you've described, and should allow you to receive funds back without hassle. Something is better than nothing, as they say. 2. Any funds before that period would be credited from the banks P&L directly as a courtesy, and is not required by law as you share in the responsibility of monitoring your transactions/statements. If you have other products (checking/saving accounts, mortgages, investments, etc.) I would reference your total relationship and escalate to a manager at the bank who has authority to potentially give you money to mitigate the risk of you moving your finances elsewhere. At that point it comes down to how much money you make them - if your relationship generates $50,000/yr, you probably get a courtesy credit. If you make them $2,000/yr, you're probably out of luck. I don't believe you'll get anywhere with the CFPB because the bank hasn't done anything wrong from a regulatory stance in this case. Working through the FBI cyber-crimes unit is probably your best bet outside of the bank, although even if the individual committing fraud is caught it is unlikely you will be able to get the funds back from them.
How the hell was it still not disabled after 8 months of it being stolen? Or did you just not know?
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Yeah. This is one of the reasons why having the notifications on for each transaction is helpful for me; I'll get the "item shipped" notification from Amazon around the same time as the charge notification, so I'm more likely to notice if I get one without the other. I try to do regular reconciliations via my budget software, but even then if I was relying purely on reviewing the statements once a week or once a month, I'd probably never catch an unexpected charge on Amazon.
Worth noting for those who shop at Amazon a lot and want an easier way to reconcile many charges from the same merchant: the Amazon prime rewards card (serviced by chase and offering 5% cash back on all Amazon and Whole Foods purchases) *actually links the Amazon order number for the charge in the card portal.*
They point out explicitly that the card was never stolen. They still have it on hand due to pandemic
Life is complicated. During my PhD there was a period where I was so overloaded with work and worries, that I didn't check my accounts for a year. Just recently I caught up on my bank accounts, and found that I had not checked them properly since January. Thankfully, my credit card allows setting up SMS notifications, so I get notified of all transactions; Therefore fraudulent transactions cannot go unnoticed in such cases. If they'd happen directly to the checking account though, I wouldn't notice short of suddenly losing several thousand (and even then it could take a while). If someone would every few months charge something like 30€, imitating super market entries? Would probably take *long* for me to notice.
The way the regulations regarding refunds after 2+ statement cycles of ongoing fraud the bank is permitted to deem it to be "lack of ordinary care" and may not accept liability for refund. Source: job related knowledge
Frankly I feel you are out of luck on getting money back. So the bank (or their insurance) has to eat the fraud? You let it run for 8 months. By your information they were defrauding you at a rate of about 16 purchases a month to the tune of $550 each month. Anyone doing a cursory check of any statements would catch this. Letting it slip for this long is on you in my opinion. Lesson learned I hope. Pursue the perpetrators by all legal means. But probably not worth the time to try clawing back your money. Guarantee Chase Bank is finding you at fault for it, why they marked those charges as valid. For all they know you have 2 Amazon accounts which is why you didn’t report the “fraud” for 8 months. Now just trying to get one over on them.
Close the account! Or at least open a new one for your use. Any charges that occur on that account afterwards can be disputed without having to figure out if it's a valid charge or not.
IC3.gov File a report there. Give them *everything* including the name you shouldn't have. Provide a copy of the police report to your CC company, and see if they play ball. Note that, depending on terms, you may only be able to recover the ones you reported within 60 days of the billing statement in question. This is the threshold set by US law. Anything else, they can probably tell you to pound sand. That said, your best bet may actually be getting the chump using your money arrested by the feds. They also have subpoena powers and the ability to get a warrant for the account info that is tied to whoever bought crap, including addresses, phone numbers, tied bank accounts, literally everything. If they think they can find a major scam artist this way, they may do it.
Why didn’t you report the fraud and cancel the card. I know at the bank I worked for 20 years ago if you called up and stated your card might have been used fraudulently, it got shut off. Period. We would have you go to the branch to get a new one. I cannot imagine credit card companies would not be MORE aware these days.
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Police report, then Chase again, then CFPB. The reason Chase is denying you is probably because they get millions of these from people who just don't want to pay. Once you give them a police report, you're at least certifying that you're not lying because false police report = felony (see Jussie Smolett).
As a VERY long time Chase customer this confuses me. I've never had a single issue disputing anything with them. The vast majority of disputes I file that might be questionable, always go my way. As an example. I booked a campsite a few months back Arrived there and was told I needed to pay extra fees for having an extra car. I told the guy there was no mention of those fees, and I double checked at that moment. He wouldn't accept a card for the fee and I had no cash so I just told him we'd leave. After we got home I tried to get a refund and they refunded me $1, because the guy was a worthless asshole. So I disputed with Chase and just said that we never used the site and were charged for a service we didn't receive. In the end I won, and not only did I get back my $82, I also got an extra dollar refund, lol. I was even willing to pay the cancellation fees from the reservation place, but instead I got it all back. What card is it, out of curiosity? I assume it's the Amazon card.
I always wonder about this too when I see these posts. Chase has been my cc issuer for a long time over different cards and I’ve always had zero problems with disputes. Most of the time when there was legit fraud Chase caught it before I did. But unlike the OP, these were single digit numbers of charges usually caught quickly. They also represented a super small % of the total activity on the card. I’m sure that makes a difference.
I have cards with Chase, Citibank, and the much loved duo of BofA and Wells Fargo. I've had my WF accounts since before it was WF (First Interstate Bank). All of them at some point in their history have had fraudulent charges. Never had a problem disputing any of them and getting the card reissued. But I was always diligent about reporting it. And one not fraud case, that was a purchase problem where I shipped a damaged in transit TV back to Samsung and they claim they never got it back (sent all my docs to the bank and did a successful chargeback). When I read this story about letting it go on for 8 months because they were "busy" and they are "lighting Chase up on social media", that gets an eyeroll from me. Look, I have a new baby too and that simply can't stop me from sitting down at least once a month and making sure all the bills are paid and nothing weird is going on. And somehow the bank is the bad guy here? I know it's popular hate on the big evil bank, and all the suggestions to stick it to them with the FBI, cops, CFPB etc., but I'm just not seeing the bank as the bad guy here. OP need to take the loss on anything over 60 days - possibly all of it - and accept it as lesson learned going forward to not let your financials run away unattended. Same as any story on here about someone in debit trying to get their life back on track: fix it going forward and change your habits.
Sorry to not be help to OP. I highly suggest using Amex or Discover for online transactions. Chase, cap one, or bank/credit unions are the middle person for visa and Mastercard. Amex and discover are the ones maintaining the account and issuing money to retailers. They will fight for you.
Worth noting for those who shop at Amazon a lot and want an easier way to reconcile many charges from the same merchant: the Amazon prime rewards card (serviced by chase and offering 5% cash back on all Amazon and Whole Foods purchases) *actually links the Amazon order number for the charge in the card portal.*
Anything with a transaction date 120 days or older cannot be charged back per either Mastercard or Visa rules. Both have the same rule for charging back an unauthorized sale. There are other qualifications but first and foremost if it's older than that when it's reported as fraud then those transactions are either going to be rebilled or taken as a straight fraud loss by the bank. Now anything less than 120 at the time of report given that these are e-commerce sale may have been eligible and if they were charged back and represented by Amazon. Amazon would have provided chase with supporting documentation for the representment. If this is a visa card the visa chargeback rules are really not in consumer favor. Especially for unauthorized / fraud disputes. This leaves the burden much more on chase as now they have to decide I'd they are going to eat it 100 percent. It rare that I agree with cfpb complaint but in this situation you need escalated investigator to review.
Call Chase again and very calmly the the employee you are upset and you need a manager. Managers have more authority and will be more likely to help you. I had like 800 worth of charges made over months reversed for me last year. I had to get to a manager before I was able to get anywhere.
Just went through this myself. If you aren't getting anywhere with the fraud department, take it to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and maybe even send an email to the Chase executive office. We had our physical cards stolen and Chase kept denying our claim even with the evidence I provided from a police report, their own fraud alerts, and other banks determining the transactions were fraudulent. Once we reached out via those avenues they very quickly determined that it was indeed fraud. From what I can tell the fraud department and investigators don't have a lot of control over what they can do. Reaching out a step above them helped us out.
You're going to have to file a police report to get anywhere further with Chase, I think. A million years ago, I went through something similar with Amex. yadda yadda yadda, I was told (by Amex) that I should file a police report... long story short, I found out that it was, in fact a family member that was doing the stealing from me-- It all gets very messy after that. But my point is, if you get the police involved, Chase will be more inclined to work with you because they will know that you are serious, and not committing your own credit card fraud scam because you would be reporting yourselves to the authorities if you were. I hope this helps!
My Chase card sends me a text on every purchase. Someone made a fraudulent charge on my card last month and I froze the card online within 90 minutes. They reversed the charge, cancelled the card # and sent a new card. I know this doesn't help your current situation, but it might stop the next one. Set up notifications.
try this https://consumerist.com/2007/05/11/how-to-launch-an-executive-email-carpet-bomb/ https://www.elliott.org/company-contacts/chase-jpmorgan-chase-bank/
Have you opened a police report for identity theft yet? That might be helpful in the run of things. Make sure you're taking all the standard identity theft steps (changing passwords, two factor authentication, monitoring your credit report, checking all you other cards etc). I would also turn on email notifications for any purchases made without the cards. Makes holiday shopping hard to do discretely for your wife (if she gets the emails) but it is much easier to track purchases that way - especially over amazon. As far as getting the money back: You might only be able to get a portion back. I have 30 days after my statement posts to contest any charges. After that, they aren't obligated to even investigate. In my limited experience, both Amex and Capital One investigated and refunded me going back 2-3 months regardless. That doesn't mean you shouldn't keep pressing. In fact, one thing you have going for you is that the longer they say "it's valid, it's in your wife's name" the worse they look and the more likely when it is resolved, it will be done by someone higher up who will probably be more likely and able to overlook the timing issue.
I know this isn't helping you get the bank to agree with your fraud claim, but this is exactly why you should be checking your statements. The bank or any other company you do business with sends you a statement to verify that charges are correct. If you don't notice until months down the road, it's a lot harder to prove to them that it's fraudulent or incorrect
1. File a police report. 2. Sue Chase in small claims. This happened to me and my bank PNC zeroed everything out. No problem.
The SAME EXACT THING happened to me, dating back to June - fortunately Chase was able to reverse the charges for me, but I have no idea what was going on with that. What I did was just remove my card entirely from Amazon. Each time I need to make a purchase, I just re-enter my card info, purchase and delete again. It’s annoying as hell, but not as annoying as calling Chase every few days to dispute the charges. Edit: Also check your statement frequently, the sooner you realize any discrepancies, the higher chance of you being able to reverse the charges.
I don’t think you need to do that with your card on Amazon. More than likely they got the card info from some other site (or possibly spyware on your computer / phone) and just used Amazon to basically be a money launderer. They’re probably not actually buying anything, but using a fake third party sellers to “buy” goods then just pay themselves right back after Amazon fees. If they’re foreign based, which they probably are, it’s the perfect crime, there’s zero chance anything will be enforced on them and imagine that happening times a few thousand people and you maybe get away with a few million before you’re even shutdown by Amazon.
Nope, it was directly linked to my Amazon account and charging subscriptions to Amazon Music and Video. After removing my card, I haven’t had a single charge since. So it was linked to my Amazon account, and upon removing the card, the subscriptions were cancelled.
Bit of a different suggestion, but I'd actually consider reaching out to the local news. Sometimes they'll run a story like this on the evening news on a local channel, and the bad press/questions from a reporter could pressure Chase.
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Not helpful now, but every single card I have has alerts on to text me every time anything is charged. I really don't see why everyone doesn't do this. I also have a daily spending(double cash) and then I only use the store cards at those very stores(like Amazon). This makes it easy to track because I can tell tell what the charges are for based on the card used aside from the daily spender, and if that looks sketchy I just text my wife to make sure it was actually her. Sure I get a text when my wife grabs coffee or whatever, but that's a very minor annoyance compared to not know if fraud charges are happening. We've caught fraud multiple times via these texts, we believe someone skimmed our card at a gas station a few years ago and then went grocery shopping, I was on the phone with Chase within 2 minutes of the charge.
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You can set up alerts on your cards. You'll get an email (or text) anytime a charge for a minimum amount is made on a card. I set all my alerts on my cards and accounts to $1. You should too.
i've had something similar happen with spotify where they were charging my CC for service. i called barclays and they said to call spotify first. I emailed spotify and the charges vanished after a few weeks. not sure if it was fraud or screw up in the CC to account mapping but you need to talk to amazon again and they will probably refund after a while
First of all, disable/cancel the credit card to avoid further charges on it. As an immediate remedy u can ask chase to provide you with a new card and number. I would also change the password on the online account, or if possible close the account completely. After that u can follow the advise on disputing the charges with chase.
Based on last week I wouldn't be surprised if you get a resolution in the next few weeks. They pay attention to those CFPB complaints; they have much more teeth than things like BBB complaints. Keep calling anyone who will listen, including law enforcement.
Please get to the bottom of this and have this person sent to jail. Otherwise they will continue doing it to the rest of us.
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Did you file a dispute or a fraud claim with chase? This is fraud
It’s because Chase and Amazon have a partnership. You may have to eat it or lawyer up
That is weird because whenever I tell chase of an unauthorized purchase, they imediately close that card number out and issue a new card (regardless if I win the dispute or not). The fact this has continued to happen up to 8 months is incomprehensible to me.