hello, wonder if any of you can help please?  I got a letter from barclaycard today to say my card may have been used fraudulently, I called them as i did not recognise some of the transactions.  Since Friday morning the card has been used on the internet to buy from different chemists around the world, including Malaysia, USA and UK totalling £800.  I have up to date norton internet security software installed on my PC, I am worrried incase my PC has been hacked.  Does anyone know if this is possible with Norton or is it more likely a web site containing my details has been hacked, and what can i do to protect my computor. any advice greatly appreciated.

Hi, I had credit card fraud committed on my Barclays Visa card a few years ago. I lost over £600 in total. The final straw was a few hundred pounds used to buy CD's on a South African website. I reported it to my bank, and they advised me to report it to the police also while they investigated the fraud. The police said that credit card fraud on Barclays accounts was common, as card start with the same four digits (4539) as standard. Apparently the police officer explained to me, that when there is no chance the card has been stolen, double swiped or that someone has got hold of account details in some way (like going through your trash), it is likely it is an internet based fraud where someone will spend all day on a computer using the first four numbers and then appying random number crunchers until they get numbers that work, they then go on to use the card. I have no idea how this works, as I know from internet shopping you need a whole lot more than that to conduct online transactions, but to be honest i was so upset by it all I wasn't really concentrating on what he was saying (I was really livingon the breadline then, away from home and the bank had frozen my account to investigate and I had no money on me and no clue when the bank would refund the fraud). I was advised by the bank to only conduct online shopping if the account address started with https: or when I could see a padlock icon in the bottom right hand corner of the screen (signifying it is a secure sight). I have norton anti-virus and I have no idea what other securities can be taken. I hopeit all gets sorted out soon for you xx

Theres also a thing called cookie grabbing.

If you ever use your card online it can leave you vulnerable to this because all information thats entered into forms is stored in cookies on internet explorer.

All you have to do for someone to get that info is go to a website that they have a CG script running on. It can be any personal site, sometimes even in signatures on forums etc.

A good way to prevent this is to delete cookies after every online transaction.
Also, for extra security use Firefox instead of IE as its not as vulnerable to attacks like these.

thanks for all your advice, luckily i do not have to pay the money back as barclaycard have only authorised payment not sent the money yet. unfortuatley it will probably the sites that have sent out whatever was ordered on my card that will loose out. my son has firefox installed on his account so i wil use that from now on, but i dont think il be using my credit cards online again.

I had the same thing happen to our bank card last week, we checked the bank balance which was fine, went into DFS to pay £1000 off our furniture, only to be told our card had been refused.

Came home phoned the bank, it's 24/7 banking, they told us over the past week there had been two transactions 1 to British Airlines for £1900 and another to a concert ticket company for £2000, they had thankfully recognised this as 'unusual behaviour' on our account so wouldn't give authorisation without our concent.

It is really worrying though isn't it, our bank did say had the transactions gone through successfully they would have refunded the money and looked into it further.  But in the meantime we've had to cancel our bank cards and wait for new ones.  Luckily they arranged with the local post office for us to draw cash, or we would have been well and truly stuck......kids needed bus fare for school etc.  Plus we don't use credit cards, so that was our only access to any funds.

Haven't a clue who or how somebody cloned our bank card, I don't use my cards online, only set up DD for paypal etc.  the only place our card did disappear from view for a minute max. was McDonalds drive through when the young lad took the card to pay and had to go find the swipe machine, but took our card with him   looking back we now realise he shouldn't have done this.

BINGO!!

A friend of mine works at Mcdonalds and a few of her workmates have been caught cloning cards.

If you can remember what the boy looks like go back to the restraunt and tell the manager.