I’m an idiot… got scammed by an email claiming to be a B&Q survey, which since I bought a bunch of stuff from them last week seemed not unusual at all. They even mocked up a pretty convincing survey… it’s only when get to the end after paying postage for the ‘free gift’ the page of small print comes up…
In fact, that was a way to sign me up for a recurring transaction of £62 a month, and they have no intention of sending the gift, as they’re not B&Q and are based in Cyprus or possibly Reykjavik depending on which bit of their site you look at.
I’ve frozen the card, given monzo a heads up… it could be a lot worse but I do hope that recurring transaction doesn’t come back to bite me - I’ve been bitten by continuous authorities before… I’m treating the card number as compromised until I get a new one.
More posting to vent and a heads up of the kind of emails going around right now.
If you’ve flagged that specific transaction as fraudulent Monzo should be able to cancel the authorisation so they can’t take any more and block any future attempts from them.
Yeah first thing I did. The ‘report as a scam’ flow doesn’t really cover the case where you gave a scammer money via debit card but I reported it anyway.
The £2 just came back…?! Kinda odd they would do that, but they now have a verified correct number in their database, so not trusting the card.
We see this loads at work, through Facebook ads usually, or car parking ads that crop up between downloading and going to pay for parking.
Generally just need to get the bank to cancel the continuous payment authority. We don’t replace cards usually unless the customer pushes for it, otherwise handled the same way as cancelling Netflix as nothing ever comes from it afterwards.
Yeah never pay for anything when doing surveys. (Even if they say we pay you so give us your bank details). Just don’t click on links for any kind of survey or AD.
What confuses me is what’s the benefit to the scammer here? If someone doesn’t notice for a month, they get billed a large amount which they more than likely do notice, it gets reported as fraud and refunded and the scammer has nothing, plus there’s a fraud investigation.
The only loss to me is some stress and time… (not a great deal of stress as I trust monzo will handle it as it’s just another day at the office for them).