This is the only indication that something was awry on a Saturday afternoon more than a month ago (see picture). I was a little puzzled why I am getting these SMS when I am not making any online purchases. After all, I only receive similar SMS when making online purchases with my HSBC card.

Anyway, I logged in to my account and found no transactions so I ignored them. However, I start getting calls from ‘Unknown Number’ for the next 2 hours. As such calls (or those showing up as ‘Private’ on my phone) are normally from agents trying to introduce fund transfers, new insurance policies or a new credit card / credit line, I generally just ignore them. I was thinking to myself that these companies are getting so desperate they even work on Saturday afternoon. In fact, I even received one such call on Sunday.

When I was at work on Monday, these calls continued and I finally decided to answer one of them during lunch with the most hostile tone I can imagine. I had enough of these incessant calls and was ready to ‘reward’ the hapless soul on the other end for his persistence with a chewing out.

When the guy identified himself to be from HSBC (and not ‘on behalf of HSBC’), I was a little alarmed since the banks typically do not do sales calls on their own. All the more so when he further identified himself to be from the security department in charge of credit card fraud. It is not just because of the SMS I have received over the weekend but also because con men are also known to impersonate bank staff. I made a mental note not to give to this person my card security code or any codes if more SMS were received. I am certain that if they were con men, they would want some of these information to complete the transaction.

The guy (I can no longer remember his name) then asked me whether I had made 2 Internet purchases made a few days ago with my card. The purchases are over US$250 and over US$450 respectively and in fact were made to purchase very different items (including female handbags). That’s almost US$1000! When I confirmed that I haven’t made any of these purchases, he then asked whether my last transaction was to a certain gaming company in Germany (which I did make). By then I decided that the guy is probably genuine because he has not asked me any personal information yet and in fact, he was actively providing me information that is confidential. If he wasn’t genuine, then he must be a very sophisticated hacker / con men trying to lure me into a false sense of security.

In the end he told me that my card will be canceled and no funds will be released for these two transaction. He informed me that a new card will be sent to me in a few days and only then did he do the usual identity verification (IC number & date of birth).

This must be the season of Internet credit card fraud because a few of my friends also recently report fraudulent transactions and they only detected them after checking their statement. They had a pretty hard time convincing the bank that they didn’t make those transactions and to get those charges waived. Fortunately for me, this is the second time HSBC has caught fraudulent transactions on my card and I thanked the bank for its proactive action. Perhaps I should really do fewer purchases online…