Fraudulent use of Visa card after shopping online, Visa man says there could be a spy thingy on my pc

[MmeLindt]

Anyone know of a decent software to check this out?

This is the second time this year that someone has used my Visa card. First time it was a Walmart in the US.

This time they have gone upmarket, now buying Dell computers, also in the US and -get this - spending $628 on c28.com, which I have just looked up. It is a Christian tshirt store. How ironic, using a stolen Visa card to buy a Jesus Tshirt.

Ha! Just checked the other company that someone used my card to pay £4500 to. LB Southwark, which google says is the London Borough of Southwark. Surely they have not tried to pay for their council taxes with a stolen visa card????

Just checked and found that I have McAfee Total Protection which has Anti-Spyware as a feature.

You sound remarkably calm about this. Why are you not running round in circles screaming about immininent bankruptcy? Are you in the clear?

Visa blocked my card as there were suspicious payments being made.

I realised when I tried to order something from Amazon that there was something wrong and phoned them. He went through a huge list of payments blocked.

He is sending me a list of payments made and I can reject any that I did not make and they will cancel them.

Thank God they are on the ball.

perhaps, clam, because Visa has contacted MmeLindt and said "we spotted these"...

There are probably a half dozen or more bits of software you could use, ML. Trend Micro has something they call HouseCall which will scan your PC. The link I gave may change to be specific to your locality, then look under Free Tools.

I had previously used their HouseCall to scan, and Hijack This to check what's running (and sometimes to remove items from startup, though Hijack This is a powerful and possibly dangerous tool as you might disable/ delete something important that allows PC to run, so not to be used lightly) but it looks like they also have another tool you might want - the Transaction Guard (which I did not know about until just now).

Also, the "Smart Surfing" tool might be worth trying, to see if it rings alarm bells for any sites you use.

Cannot think of other things this instant which might do much more than scan - AVG Free certainly can be installed and will check files every day, for malware. AVG and other firms also offer link checking to see if the website you are about to visit might be infected with something...

Most of them do this from databases of suspicious websites, and of course could flag as "dangerous" something which is harmless. Google has/had some warning system which was a major pain for a friend (with his own photography business and a separate tourist guide website as one got blacklisted and would not let people visit from Google... took major work to cancel blacklisting and may have lead to unfounded worry by users looking at perhaps the best guide to the Roman walls in Chester).

I'm a big fan of this for Spyware detection and removal:
www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

Would probably do no harm to try the HouseCall scan anyway.

One problem with scanning software is how up-to-date a database of "known signatures of malware" is - clearly when something new is on the loose, it takes hours up to days for the user to get a copy of that signature onto their database and for it to then find any infection.

Some malware changes every few hours so the "signature" changes and is more difficult for any detection to work. Bad news, I know.

I am doing a full scan with McAfee right now, and have checked what I have there.

I recently upgraded to their full protection and just noticed that they have a bit where I can put in certain details such as name, address and visa card number and they will block the transmission of these data from my computer. Never noticed that before, so that might help.

Will have a look at the other websites that you recommended, thanks.

That's ad aware free .php (no spaces)
or click this link

Would these websites offer more protection that my current McAfee one does?

Sorry to hear this Mme Scary stuff.

My card is 'protected' (don't know how well) by my bank's online signature thing - every time I use it online I have to enter a password.

Just came across this PCWorld USA software category with quite a few free items.

I had heard of some (like Comodo Firewall) but not tried them all, and there are plenty of other libraries, but this seems not to be full of adverts of links to paid-for stuff as well, since it's a PC store and not dependent on commission or Google Ads to cover the running of the website...

It's probably not clear cut, MmeL, as one week some other software might detect something McAfee doesn't and the next week, McAfee might spot something unknown to some other security software.

No machines are completely invulnerable, no software can be classed as "guaranteed" or gives "100%" in this field, as the hazards are changing hour by hour as some misguided sod hacker puts something else online.

All I'd say is that even with a paid-for product, you've no guarantee it will pick up everything. As an individual, it is perhaps just as good to try the free tools (which are merely cut down versions of the commercial products, or are a bit less flexible).

Most of these are available free, as a "taster" so someone in a corporate buying capacity could order the product for 500 PCs or more. So they make the free version do pretty much everything the commercial one does, though they might release the new version of the database only once per day for users of the free software.

(One of my clients has a mail server with protection using Kaspersky which updates several times a day so it scans all e-mail with as up-to-date a database as possible.)

Ok, will try one of the other products. A bit of googling turned up the info the McAfee AntiSpyware is not that great so will try something else.

Thanks for the advice.

Oh this is horrible Mme... hope it is all sorted soon.

Personally I would just get rid of Windows and use a Unix or Linux based O.S instead.

I washed my hands of the whole Windows, anti-virus, spy ware software thing about 12 years ago and have never looked back.

Ryoko
I don't think that I am techy enough to do that.

Just had a thought earlier. I have Kindle for iPhone and have been downloading books and paying for them on my iPhone, using the credit card.

Actually installing Linux is a hell of a lot easier then installing Windows and a lot quicker too.

I would have thought the place you was buying books from would be safe, but then the iphone is very hackable so I guess you might have an interloper on there.

Mind you in this day and age it could just as easily be someone from your card company call centre selling client details.

DH had this happen to him and he doesn't shop online. hIS CARD was either cloned in Sainsbury's, Kwikfit or a posh restaurant in Sheffield. I suspect the waiter at the restaurant.

Anyway his credit card company stopped his card as they were suspicious. What I thought was dd though was that most of the fraudulant purchases were Ebay purchases. Surely using a cloned crd to buy stuff that has to be posted to you isn't the cleverest thing?

Ryoko - I am interested in installing a Unix or Linux based O.S but have absolutely no idea where to start - could you give me some pointers?

(sorry to hijack the thread)

MMe Lindt - ask where the details were stolen from. When my card was used for a £10.5k spending spree last year I was told that the details were got when the ancestry.co.uk website was hacked.

stripeyknickers ... they could use stolen cards to "buy" overpriced items (where an associate is the "seller"). Nothing needs to be posted, no-one else would buy a camera or table for 10x its normal price, but the "seller" then has "clean" (laundered) money from the account of the card holder and if they can move that into a bank account, can split with whoever the "buyer" was on Ebay.

(mookle - probably better to start a new thread as there are a lot of different versions of linux, most of which you can just download (assuming your broadband service has a generous monthly limit, eg 10 GB or more... Also you may find a Linux magazine in W H Smith with a DVD holding several versions, so you can try one or more and see if you prefer one for colour scheme and features... or look on Ebay and you may be able to get a CD or DVD from someone for under 3 quid - Linux is free but they cannot buy the CDs/DVDs for 0p and they are burning the copy for you and then posting, but I would not spend more than 2-3 pounds unless they are offering at least 3 version of Linux)

Mookie google Ubuntu, Mandriva or SUSE find there main pages and look for the Live CD downloads, you can get them for free you just have to burn them yourself.

thats a O.S that boots from the CD (or in some cases a USB stick) so you can see if you like a cut down version without having to install anything first.

if you like it, the CD will let you install it and then you can use the search for updates option to get everything else available.

there are different GUI types most common are KDE and Gnome I recommend trying KDE as it's the most widely used so there are more things made for use on it.

Thanks Ryoko