Be Excellent To Each Other

A mate of mine is currently feeling a bit stressed, because his parents recently contacted him to say an order had arrived for him via courier to their house in North Wales. This is puzzling to him, as he didn't order anything and now lives in London.

On closer inspection the order appears to have a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, and trainers from some mail ordering company with a value of about £100. None of the items are even in his size.

On contacting the company it turns out 'he' apparently ordered it last Thursday, except he didn't.

Naturally he suspects some kind of card fraud (although the only account it could be has been defunct for quite some time), but what kind of fraud sees items purchased and then sent to the cardholder's address? Is this a bungled fraud or some kind of cunning plan, somehow?

Sounds like a bungled fraud to me.

Very odd if it isn't.

About a year ago my Dad had £800 worth of engineering software turn up, so yes, there are some idiotic fraudsters out there that get stuff sent to the cardholders address. Apparently someone "Nigerian sounding" had phoned in the order and the company wouldn't ship it anywhere other than the cardholders address. Of course if he'd just cancelled the order, he could probably have carried on using my dad's card for other things for quite a while before he noticed (when he phoned the bank, there'd been a few phone top-ups on there as well that weren't his).

Has he not checked the account yet, then? It might just be a gift from someone!

Often the fraudsters just 'test' the card for a reasonable amount and then sell the now validated card details on for profit. My advice: get the card cancelled ASAP to avoid further bother.

Also sometimes a site will only let you deliver to the cardholder's address for the first purchase on that account, but will then let you change it after that.

After shouting at him to ring his bank ASAP, he's done so. Yep, the transaction came out of his old account, the card for which has been sitting unused in a drawer for two years. Luckily it was the only transaction and he'll be refunded in 5-7 days, they reckon.

So the leading theory is that assuming a new card was probably due to arrive by now, it got stolen by some cunt at the post office.

I shred everything with my name on it. Nothing personally identifiable goes out of my house without being in a zillion pieces, but you just can't guard against fuckers stealing your post.

Indeed - the Royal Mail tends to employ a lot of temps in their sorting offices to sort through the mail, indeed I used to be one whilst at Uni. Stealing people's cards, etc, would've been a piece of piss had I been so inclined.

At my first law firm, someone at the local sorting office kept nicking the cheques sent in by clients to pay our fees. Someone at the sorting office had set up a bank account in the name of "Mr [Chris's Firm]" and cashed a load of them. He made a *lot* of money before he was found out and slung in the gaol.

Gaol is an ace word.

I work for a credit-card-y type place and am usually first to leap in with assertions of how rare and unlikely actual card fraud is, but have recently learned some new things.

Not much you can do if you send something to someone with a return address on, and they bin it without shredding either. Let's all make an early New Year's Resolution, and make sure we shred anything with someone else's address on it too.

We should just all fix shredders to our letterboxes and have done with it.

Well, I can more than sympathise, as I am sure you understand. One of my replacement replacement cards has also gone missing, by the way.

Presumably one of the things you have learnt is that card fraud is common and likely.

I assumed you worked with lightbulbs, Kalmar.

I have had two credit cards arrive at my house in the name of a previous tenant. I called the bank that issued them to report that the person no longer lived here, but the second one arrived 2 years later, so lord only knows how messed-up her accounts are. They were issued by one of those awful high risk customer banks and had a 48% interest rate or something.