Another scam alert from a reader that's worth sharing...

I'm "brave", I make on-line payments, enjoying the instant gratification and feel it may be safer than post office mail. But a couple months ago, I was down to the wire, it was storming badly, so I telephoned my payment to the phone number on a credit card statement. A few weeks later I received a call from the "verification" Dept. asking if we had made a $1000. purchase, which we had NOT.

We were then transfered to the Fraud Investigation Dept. who explained that it looked suspicious, since soon followed our account being paid off, we had a healthy credit limit, and it was in the vicinity of where there had apparently been previous fraud purchases.

From what I could gather, the telephone payment process had been outsourced in an effort to save money.

Needless to say - these outsource companies do not have the security checks required on bank employees that we believed we were intrusting our personal information to. We told them to immediately close the new account & never issue cards.

The fraud caused us lost time and stress.

But the frosting on the cake, occured Saturday when we opened our mail to find that the NEW account had a balance of $9900! Seems that it was never closed or "someone internal" re-opened the account, and made purchases.

By the time I called, the address had also been changed to a nonexistent address. Thank goodness, they were 2 days late to keep our statement from getting to me.

At this point, I do not want to mention the name of the credit card company, as to not impede the investigation. However, as soon as it is safe to do so, I will be MORE than HAPPY to let everyone know exactly what credit card company has no concern for their personal security!

At this point, they have suggested that I keep a constant vigil on my credit bureau, to make sure that these crooks do not open additional accounts, but they don't "think" they've got access to our Social Security numbers.

Cricket adds: Sheesh! As if we don't have enough worries about fraud from outside agencies, now we have to worry about what companies our bank use to outsource phone transactions and customer service? Thanks for sharing this story, however distressing.