Peter
Full time employment: Posting here.
Received a credit card text message saying that there was a transaction charged to my card that was over my preset alert limit. Not an order that I had placed. Called the card company who swiftly reversed the transaction. I should be getting a replacement card tomorrow.
A bit later I checked my email to find 100+ spam messages. Huh? Anything to do with the fraudulent transaction? Well ... yes!
Turns out that bad actors link your card number to your email, presumably by hacking into some merchant's site. They order something on the card, furniture costing $1900 in my case. Then they hit your email with multiple messages; I was getting one every few seconds! The idea is that any notification of the transaction will be swamped by all the spam emails, and you'll delete it along with the rest. And since the emails appear to come from legitimate sources, they don't get caught in spam filters.
Fortunately I got the text message and was able to get the card disabled before any damage was done. Don't know if the bad transaction got declined at the merchant, but in any case the stream of emails died down after a couple of hours. Now I get one or two per hour. Hopefully that will stop eventually.
Had me panicking for a while!
A bit later I checked my email to find 100+ spam messages. Huh? Anything to do with the fraudulent transaction? Well ... yes!
Turns out that bad actors link your card number to your email, presumably by hacking into some merchant's site. They order something on the card, furniture costing $1900 in my case. Then they hit your email with multiple messages; I was getting one every few seconds! The idea is that any notification of the transaction will be swamped by all the spam emails, and you'll delete it along with the rest. And since the emails appear to come from legitimate sources, they don't get caught in spam filters.
Fortunately I got the text message and was able to get the card disabled before any damage was done. Don't know if the bad transaction got declined at the merchant, but in any case the stream of emails died down after a couple of hours. Now I get one or two per hour. Hopefully that will stop eventually.
Had me panicking for a while!
