Tag: fraud

Credit Rating Agencies

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

Late last year I was the victim of identity theft (again).
Apparently this is not actually a crime!

Someone had attempted to take out two credit cards in my name.
One of the cards arrived at my house which is what triggered the investigation.

Contacting the credit card companies is not always as simple as it should be.
One of them had a fraud department that works outside of office hours.
The other had better fraud detection (they did not send me a card) but required me to spend half and hour on their phone system before I was able to talk to someone. You need to include a fraud path in your call centre messages.
Not all people calling have a customer number.

I have been using https://www.checkmyfile.com/ to perform cross agency checks.
Each of the credit card companies had made 2 hard searches against my account.

Hard searches are recorded as attempts to get credit.
Soft searches are simply other companies keeping an eye on your data.

These make it onto your credit file almost immediately.
Getting them removed is much slower.

To start with the credit agencies will only deal with the people who notified them.
It can take a company 2 weeks to make this call. It can take a credit agency 6 weeks to remove it from your file.
This does mean that any incident can require 3 months of fees to the checking service.

I am now 6 weeks from the event and I still have one credit search to remove.

Kafkaesque Support from Barclaycard

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

I am currently trying to get a problem resolved with Barclaycard.

A few years ago a fraudster tried to steal my Barclaycard using the Barclaycard call centre. The first time triggered the fraud protection and my card was blocked. That time I added a password for changes to my account.

A month later the same thing happened and the call centre allowed the change despite the requirement of the password (it was not guessed, just sidestepped). The fraud team again caught the problem and blocked the card. It was during the conversations that I had with the fraud department that convinced me that they really did not understand security. They were about to read out an address line attached to the account before I had verified myself (I stopped them). A month later that would have been a GDPR violation.

It required a distinct call the next day to close down my Barclaycard as whilst blocked no action can be taken (all calls related to a blocked card get routed to the fraud department and they don’t deal with card closures).

Some years later I have found that Barclaycard had sent the address that they knew was fraudulent to a Credit Agency as a “confirmed address”. This is something that only Barclaycard can correct. I called the support number and was put eventually got through to the fraud detection team. I asked that the invalid address be removed.

A month later nothing had changed. I had no confirmation of my first communication and had started to be billed for the credit checking service that I am now using.

This is when I looked up the email address of the CEO of Barclaycard to make my complaint. They did get back to me the same day with a reference number and asked for my availability to take a call. I gave a few hours that day and most of the following.

There was no call back 2 days later, so I chased via Twitter. Now I find that the availability details were for the next 5 days!

It’s now a week from the email so I chased up via twitter. This time I am told that a letter has been sent and given the phone number that the letter asks me to call. The first time the call was lost after 15 mins. The second time it rang for 2 hours.

Again I chased via twitter. This time I was told that a specialist case handler has been assigned, but may not be able to get back to me until next week! Apparently the people at the number I have been given would not be able to help me anyway!

This is slowly turning into a Kafkaesque nightmare. What is the point of sending a letter with a phone number that:

  • Won’t be answered in under 2 hours
  • Won’t be able to help anyway.

I have so far been waiting (in total) for 3 hours for the calls to be answered, and now I find that they can’t help yet.

Hopefully I will get a call next week.