There is a credit card scam making the rounds. Targets ostensibly receive a letter from their credit card company that informs them that they have gone over their credit limit and that further transactions are suspended until the over-payment is paid and that must be done immediately.
The target is invited to contact the credit card company on 0800 03 11 03 (their spacing, 0800 031103) to discuss any queries and make the payment.
If you call the number, you will be asked for a Switch or Delta card number to make this payment.
Exceed card limit on credit card scam
If you receive a letter like this, contact your credit company using a phone number that your credit card company have given to you, is on their statements or that is available on their website.
You may be asked to forward the letter to your company.
The letter has an obviously poor quality feel to it, cheap paper stock and what looks like an ink-jet quality letterhead for the company logo. Nonetheless, in the stress of reading such distressing tidings it might be too easy to overlook such details.
The Royal Mail address details for the company in this case are correct, as is the 0870 number.
For the account number, it also seemed as if they had used the Capital Letter ‘O’ rather than the numeral zero ’0′ which seemed like an implausible error – however, that is a tiny detail and we probably only noticed because we knew that the letter had to be a scam or A Horrible Mistake. Sadly, as much as I would like to pretend to be the sort of spontaneous, loving, spouse who would buy a holiday for the family in the Caribbean as a surprise, I am aware that such extravangance would not be met with a loving and warm reception as a pair of frosted-over eyes would enquire just where and when I had taken leave of my senses.
4 Comments
February 20, 2009 at 2:32 pm
There seems to be a chap giving out this same number on a money saving forum as well:
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=950257
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=12358661
February 20, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Michael, we don’t know if the number was maybe legit last year but we contacted our credit card company this morning and there is absolutely no such expenditure on our card (issues of the credit card limit aside).
We’ve now updated to post a copy of the letter just to give people an idea of what might be happening.
I just hope that nobody gets this who isn’t completely up to date on what is on their credit card or is too frightened to discuss this issue with their family having got into trouble following redundancy or whatever.
Like most people on MSE, we pay off our credit cards so knew we couldn’t be anywhere near the limit but not everyone does and the stress might make them susceptible to this.
February 20, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Same old same old scam.
I had an email one the other day informing me about security leaks on my Natwest account (spelled incorrectly) from xxxxx@lloydstsb.com.
I think they got the wrong banking merger there.
And the return address buried in the header was xxx@highwayman.com.
At least they had the decency to confess in the real name.
As ever – all they need is one in ten thousand and they are quids in.
(And one way they do score highly is by a spouse opening up a threatening letter, panicking and doing something about it). So tell the other half to be circumspect.
February 20, 2009 at 5:55 pm
They’re doing this because lots of newspapers have run articles warning people to ignore emails like this.
It’s always a scam but it feels worse now so many people are in so much financial difficulty.