Interesting. My credit card was hijacked the other night, and I learned about it in a manner that sounds an awful lot like this scam. I guess that’s why the scammers take this approach, since it so closely resembles the legitimate way banks do it.
An automated call to my old landline number told me to return the call to the number shown on caller ID, which was a toll-free number. I looked up that number and found that its connection to the bank seemed to be legitimate. But I didn’t call that number. It seemed safer calling the number on the back of my credit card, and from a different phone, as suggested in the story linked to here. I used a different phone because I had to. The old landline number goes to magicJack and I don’t have any way to make calls from that number, since I don’t know what happened to the magicJack adapter or whatever it’s called.
Strange I saw this story, too, since I was not looking for anything on this matter. My assumption is that someone purchased a credit card with my number on it off the Dark Web. All they got away with was a chicken dinner at Popeye’s. The other 2 or 3 attempted transactions were detected by the bank’s fraud alert system, which is pretty impressive. I was a little concerned because the last time I got a call from the bank about strange credit card purchases it was just the beginning of a full bore identity theft episode that lingered in my credit reports for years. This does not appear to be anything like that, at least not yet. I am hostage to UPS today as I wait for delivery of my new credit card so I can update all my many accounts that are paid automatically.
Scammers are targeting landline telephone numbers, claiming that there have been ‘suspicious charges’ on your account.
Source: SCAM ALERT: Watch out for “suspicious account activity” claims
