On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 7:41 PM, mash lists <mashlists@gmail.com> wrote:
I'd like to know whether anyone here has ever been a victim of the above or know anyone who has. How was the response from the bank? You dont have to mention the bank.
Sometimes back, a sister to a friend of mine came visiting from the US. She's an American of Kenyan origin after having migrated to the US via the Green Card syndrome:-) Well, what happened is that although she's 'formerly' a Kiuk, the American system happened to have changed her, so much so that when she went to church one of the days, she carelessly put her handbag down under the seat she was occupying. One thing led to another as the handbag disappeared from God's own house. And that marked the beginning of a long running episode I had with a major local supermarket chain and a major bank. The lady's credit card was used to purchase items from several branches of the supermarket, to the tune of about half a million, within a span of just a few days! Naturally, I reasoned that it should never have happened, as the cashiers at the supermarket are supposed to verify the identity of the person doing the purchase via a credit card. All the purchases using the credit card were never supported by her passport, which luckily was not in the purse that got snipped. Well, I had several e-mail exchanges with the head of ICT in the supermarket, with evidence we obtained from the lady's overseas bank that showed all the transactions. In a way, the supermarket chain's ICT head did his best to protect the reputation of their chain, and was almost deciding on not doing anything regarding the fraud, but based on research I did at that time about Credit Card frauds and the writeup I had done, I simply told him that I had a very nice article for both local and Int'l media if he decided that they (supermarket) was not responsible and had no culpability at all in the fraud. I believe this kind of made him wake up. He requested me to chill a bit. The next calls I received were from their bankers' department that deals with such Fraud cases. In another week or so after the call from their bankers, my friend's sister had all the money that had been used off her credit card refunded. In a nutshell, you need to build a very water-tight case on the incident. Every organization that does business using Credit Cards must have a system of verifying that whoever is using the card has authority over the card. They are supposed to even contact the bank that issued the card to authenticate the transaction if they have doubts on the identity of the person. It's different if the transaction was done online though. -- Best regards, Odhiambo WASHINGTON, Nairobi,KE +254733744121/+254722743223 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ "If you have nothing good to say about someone, just shut up!." -- Lucky Dube