Credit card fraudsters swipe €4,500 from woman’s house fund

ELAYNE FARRELL will think twice the next time she swipes.

A cursory glance at her credit card transactions last Monday revealed what every card-holder fears someone else was taking advantage of her plastic.

Elayne, from Straffan, Co Kildare, is building a house with her husband Ian and she went on-line to check her finances via AIB's 24-hour internet banking.

Imagine her surprise when her Visa card transactions came in €4,500 more expensive then the usual monthly high.

"I was checking our current account and I decided to check the Visa account as well. I saw loads of transactions and I thought, my God, there's no way I've spent all that.

"Between September 23 and 27, there were many small transactions. When I took a closer look, I saw names like Asda, the British supermarket chain and TGI Friday, which I've never been in and Gap Kids and BP Petrol. I knew those transactions weren't mine."

Most of the sums spent were small, not glaring enough to attract much attention and would possibly go un-noticed among more casual credit-card users. "Figures ranging from 20 to 48, amounts that wouldn't look wrong on most people's statements," she said.

Elayne checked that her husband hadn't lost her credit card and then rang AIB. "They asked me if I'd been out of the country. They said according to my credit card, I had been in Spain on Sunday. There were other transactions in Glasgow and England."

In fact, Elayne was in Wigoders buying wallpaper for her new house on Sunday.

AIB took Elayne at her word. A spokesman for the company's credit card services said customers were generally not liable for credit card fraud except in a case where the credit card was lost and used with the PIN number at an ATM.

"The only other time the customer may be held liable is when they are negligent in reporting a fraud, but each case is examined on its individual merit," the spokesman said.

Elayne believes her card fraud began on September 17, around the time she handed her card over in a restaurant and left it out of sight for a couple of minutes.

She may have been the victim of "skimming" a practice used in some restaurants to download credit card information from the card's magnetic strip, before swiping it through the till.

Whatever happened, she wants to make sure it doesn't happen again.

"I am thinking of transferring my balance onto my husband's card and reducing the limit and then maybe getting rid of it," she said.

Elayne outlined her experience on Gerry Ryan's radio show, where 91% of listeners voted in a poll to include fingerprint ID on credit cards.