The Eclectic Interweb

I’ve been buying online for years and never had a single problem. Purchases have arrived, refinds given.. no issues… until recently.

For a start I’ve had my online (e-gold) account hacked and emptied twice.. which was bad but unfortunately always possible because of the way I waws using it. However I now have had a couple of much more serious events.

Firstly on Friday I received a Masterguard statement which showed a $225 payment made to someone I’d never heard of. Secondly I received a letter from my Credit Union telling me I was overdrawn by over $80.

Both payments were made to a PayPal account so my first port of call will be to them to let them know they have a criminal customer.

While I do that I’ve contacted my Credit Union who say they will refund the payments as soon as I fax them a letter explaining what has happened and that I didn’t authorise any payments. MasterCard have been less supportive saying we must have authorised the payment… so we’ll cross t hat bridge tomorrow when I contact them again.

I can only assume that either I have a Trojan somehwere on my desktop machine that has passed all my information out to a third party *or* that online payments have somehow been intercepted (again perhaps via a Trojan). A third option is that the companies I have dealt with have been carrying out fraud and I find that very hard to believe.

This is a little embarrassing to say the least, but be warned. Although this is the first time I’ve had anything like this happen in 5 years of trouble free online purchasing, it looks like those days mioght be ending.