So we got a robo-call from our bank saying that there were suspicious charges on our Debit Card. Boy were they right. The one that tripped the alert was a web site in South Africa. I had the card canceled, but not before a bunch of other charges had gone through. There were a bunch of $1.13 from “ME.COM”. Now being an iTunes and a mobile me user  I still found this odd. Even though I had purchased Music last night, the description text on the statement always says “APPL iTunes” .

I confirmed with Apple that yes indeed, someone is using the ME.COM description as a front for fraudulent Charges. Hoping that if you did visit the site that you would say “Oh, look it’s just apple, those must be the songs I bought…”. Don’t fall for it. Your card number has been compromised. Call your bank.

So don’t let this fool you. If you see a ME.COM that looks like you’ve been buying music .. don’t skip over it. It’s a fraudulent charge.

Now I just hope that with my banks help we have nipped this in the bud before they drain my account.

I have been wanting to switch over to the PayPal Secure Card method for online transactions. Guess it’s time to do that. Their plug-in does not support OS X though. The Secure Card method generates a Visa Debit Card number that you can use one time. So in a sense it’s a throwaway Debit Card number.

Note: It could have been a lot worse, because the bank called our home phone. If Robin had not been there to get the call, we would have been doing this tonight and who knows how many charges later. I’m going to give the bank my google voice number. That way if it happens again, the news will not be sitting on an answering machine all day.

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