I was speaking with the bratness (my sister) last night on MSN and she has had £600 taken out of her bank account and she isnt sure were it has gone. The bank cant do anything until monday because she isnt signed up for phone banking and the police ont do anything because she cant prove its been taken by fraud (until she goes the bank on monday)
She is up to her eyes in debt so personally i think this is just her bad money management but my dad had his credit card details taken from the Nike website (He was buying the Lance Armstrong charity bands - was the 1st thing he has ever bought online!!) the credit card company picked it up as he had the card for months and never used it and all of a sudden £3000 got used in electrical stores in southern spain. They just wiped the balance off but it totally freaked him out - Took him ages before he would use it again.



Has it affected anyone else?

I've been sent new cards since some site I registered on had a safety breach. But as far as I know I havn't lost any money in frauds or such. I am not particulary picky of were I give out my card number. But then I don't keep all that much money on th ecard and I have no credit. I have most of my monay on a separate account and then I use the phone-bank or internet-bank to transfer about £100 per week, depending on my balance.

Pretty smart, ey? That's what I though until my cellphone broke down, I had no money on the account and I needed to buy a ticket for the bus...
Luckely I can run short distances without getting a seizure and we keep a fair amout of money at home, just in case.

Ive had nothing happen, at least I think... but my money does seem to dissapear strangely at an alarming rate. Lol.

I've had no bad experiences so far, mainly due to knowing a bit about the methods and watching for them. There's been a number of e-mails to me suposedly from Paypal and eBay saying "you need to update your account information"- thing is these had mostly been sent to the e-mail i formerly used on those accounts or a quick check on the actual sites (don't ever click the links in those e-mails) find no trace of "unusual activity" or the item number quoted in the e-mail.

Most of my shopping online is at well known names such as Amazon- I steer clear of the smaller independent sites. The bigger guys have been at it long enough to know what holes to plug security-wise.

Thats what my dad thought Lyndon - But it was Nike.com that my dad used to get those bands so i guess you never can tell

I get emails all the time from my bank asking me to update my details via email and i never ever click on those!! Ie actually emailed the bank support to tell them about the emails but they never seem bothered about it

No internet fraud for me, but I have had cards stolen before. Last thanksgiving somebody stole one of my credit cards and spent $300 on Thanksgiving day. My back, however, did not make me pay for the fradulent charges.

Only thing I can think of is my sister. She's one of the luckiest people you could EVER know. You know the sort, the ones who, if they fell in ooh:" class="inlineimg" /> , they'd come up smelling as roses.

Anyway, she was at a local pub about 3 or 4 years ago and she stupidly left her handbag or just her purse. Anyway, she went back and surprise surprise it had gone. Anyway, she tried contacting the bank but couldn't get hold of them until the following Monday (think she had it taken on Friday).
Anyway, the people used her card that VERY NIGHT at a local posh Mexican restaurant. They then spent ALOT at a local Drinks shop (people in England might know the name Threshers) and also ALOT at the local supermarket.
Anyway, turns out she lost quite a few hundred pounds. The bank wrote it ALL off AND paid her the money back.
She's one lucky cow, lol.
As me mum says "She must've been born under a lucky star"

Never been stung myself (yet!!!). But I guess there's a ton of precautions you can take to minimise potential fraud.

1. I tend to use Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer as there's a ton of security gaps with IE.
2. As a precaution always clear all cookies etc and exit out of your browser and re-enter before doing any financial transactions.
3. Don't use another persons PC to conduct transactions unless you are confident that they a) regularly use the pc for financial transaction without problems and They are clued up and use security measures.
4. Regularly use programs like Ad-Aware and Spybot to minimise potential theats.
5. Don't keep any financial passwords, bank Ac numbers on your pc. If you have the memory retention of a goldfish , write them down (pen and paper) and hide them in a secure place.

There's a plethora of other tips to secure your banking details, although most of it is common sense, anyone can be stung. Just a matter of making sure your not wearing a big target sign shouting hit me, hit me (metaphorically speaking)

Never been stung (yet?) myself either, but I am very very cautious with what I do online. I don't do ANY financial transactions online other than purchasing, and there are only 2 places at which I will do any purchasing, one of them being Amazon, the other iTunes (for son's iPod, so that was only a few times, and now no more since he's moved out). I've not gotten any of those emails that I've heard about, re: paypal and other accounts, but I guess it's because I don't have one! heehee I've gotten some of the nigerian scam mails and don't even bother to open them, I have my settings to include OODLES of things to get automatically bounced and trashed and blocked, for example: If the "from" line has the words work from home , automatically bounce to sender and block sender", stuff like that, so most of the time I don't even see the crap. I have the fullest Norton package that I could find, including spam monitoring, internet security et al, up to date and run everything available on it about 3 times a week. I run AdAware and Spybot 2-3 times a week... what else...?? Oh, I get the Snopes letter regularaly and another from Scambusters as well, to keep up to date on what to look out for. Oh yeah, and I do clean out my temp folders and cache and all that crap once or twice a week too. Oh, and Live Update with Norton, of course!! heehee What's the point of having it if you're not gonna do the Live Update!? And I never ever ever open any email if I don't recognize the sender... so if any of you ever send me an email, please make sure the subject line identifies you!! heh heh

Oh yeah, one last thing; I never use any computer other than my own!!