How does this work then?

Mrs Sinatra was contacted by automated dialler from her bank earlier in the week. She ignored several calls as it sounded dodgy, turns out this was the legitimate bit!

Yesterday she got an email from PayPal confirming a payment of £32 to Game retail Ltd. She doesn’t have a PayPal account and never shops at Game.

Today her bank card was blocked. She contacted the bank to ask why, turns out her card had been used in San Fransico, they spotted the suspicious use and blocked it. The Game purchase was a test purchase (although £32 seems quite a lot to me for a test purchase)

Bank (RBS) has been great, picked up on it straight away and she has not lost any money.

What is the likely source of this? It can’t be straightforward card skimming as they were also able to make the link with her email address? She does shop online but always uses a credit card for this?

Do I need to run a good clean up on the laptop or is there likely

Has she used her card at a hotel, petrol station, restaurant etc
These are always targets, they will take away ?iur card record details, if its a hotel they will have ?iur e mail address a lot of the time

Yesterday she got an email from PayPal confirming a payment of £32 to Game retail Ltd. She doesn’t have a PayPal account

So how do Paypal have an e-mail address for her? Are you sure it was from Paypal? Did she click on any links?

I’m sure it was paypal, the address was the same as the emails I get from them (legitimate ones when I buy on eBay)

She did stay in a hotel in Glasgow about 2 weeks ago

If someone purchased a download game from Game, they could pay using her card details via paypal payment. Maybe they needed an email address to order.

I’ll be getting her to change email password later as well

Last month we got took for 91 payments of £4.48 over three days, we spotted it before the useless bloody bank! It was the mrs’ debit card which is apparently good for 30 payments a day in total and then it stops. She rarely uses the card (as we buy everything on tesco cc) and we narrowed it down to being skimmed at either the local tesco or morrisons cash machine. Unbelievably a lad at work who lives in the same town was done last week by the same company for the same amount!!

Step 1 – never use your switch/bank card
Step 2 – go to step 1

Had my credit card done a few times, one was traced back to a particular garage as that was all I’d bought for a couple of weeks – cashier was skimming the cards it seemed.

Step1 is fine but what if you need cash?

Malware scan on her PC would be prudent.

Did the paypal email address her by name or start “dear customer” or similar? If the latter, it’s fake.

Cashback for cash

She did stay in a hotel in Glasgow about 2 weeks ago

That’s where I would start looking.

Two out of three times for me were Hotels.

They have your card details plus plenty of other details too to make life easier.

Cashback for cash

How does that help ?
You still need to use your card.

Shop chip and pin machines don’t get attacked like unattended outdoor cash machines do. Therefore cashback is a safer way of obtaining cash, if you can.

How does that help ?
You still need to use your card.

But you can use your credit card, rather than a debit card, and don’t get charged for the a cash advance iirc

Step1 is fine but what if you need cash?

Cash machine in somewhere secure, bank/supermarket etc. And also take out the same amount (say £50), that way you’ll have ‘history’ if something goes wrong.