Complaint Review: Credit One Bank - Seattle WA

 You reported the alleged fraud and they cancelled the account accordingly. In the mean time, they issued you a new account and apparently the due date is coming up for your account. The alleged fraud does not suddenly make the due date vanish.

Even though I didn’t lose any money, and not a lot of time on the phone, there are many other people out there who weren’t so lucky...I suspect this is your opinion and supposition only and not factual.  In reality, it doesn't happen as often as you think. 

BestBuy should have notified my bank or me directly...No retailer has any obligation to report any purchase to a bank for any purchase, for any reason - period.  Knowing what I know about financial institutions, they don't have the time to peruse through millions of notifications to try and identify the incredibly few that might be fradulent.  If they were notified every time there was a transaction by a retailer, then their system would be so inundated, they would never get around to notifying you of a fraudulent transaction.

So maybe you want the retailer to notify you??  All I have to do is pretend to be you - I give the retailer my contact information - changing the information the retailer would have for you is much easier at the retailer's end than the banks, and voila....it becomes a real transaction to the retailer when they notify me (pretending to be you) to confirm the purchase.  Then when you later challenge the validity of the purchase, the bank contacts the retailer who has my confirmation (pretending to be you) that this is a real transaction, and your challenge is denied.  It actually works to your detriment to have the retailer notify you.

but I want to know exactly who, how, and what was bought, and how they accessed my bank account at all...  Let's say for a brief moment the information was not private.  The bank gives you a name of a person who accessed your bank account.  Is it a real name?  NO.  So that's useless.  Where was the transaction initiated (you don't even ask that information)?  The bank could access the IP address where the transaction came from, but generally the IP address the bank has is either masked (most common), or a piggyback (also common), so that's useless information as well.  Thieves don't use their actual IP address to commit such a crime.  How is pretty simple.  There are a number of ways - from you making a purchase off of a non-secure site - to someone who was able to access the account through trial and error - they know the ABA number of the bank - it's public information.  The rest is something their software can handle.  It could even be someone you know?  Bottom line is the bank doesn't know.

Whether the information is public or private (it is private), it's useless information to you because none of it is real.  Banks work hard to catch such thieves, but they generally have very little to go on to catch the thief, and in most cases, the thief is generally outside anyone's jurisdiction.  I wouldn't spend time stewing about it.  What you should be happy about is that the bank's control features worked.

As far as the retailer goes, they have no way to determine a fraudulent transaction, and whatever information the retailer has would be phony as well - just as explained above.  Even the ship-to address means little; with all of the shipping scams out there, even the ship-to won't get you the thief or their information.  It would probably get you some stay-at-home mom who is trying to supplement the family income - not knowing she's a part of the scam.

Finally, no one who comments here is an employee of the retailer or the bank - including me.  Best of luck to you....