Lloyds TSB customer? Concerned about security?

yesfan

During the last year or so, myself and my wife have been victims of credit/debit card fraud on four different occassions, totalling nearly £4000 of fraudulently obtained goods or cash. This is unfortunate, but is not uncommon these days and many people have also suffered in this way. On each occassion the bank or card issuer refunded the amount and we have not actually lost any money. Even so, it is concerning that we have suffered this amount of fraud in such a short period, how often is this going on now?

Heres the really worrying part!

The most recent fraud was this month on my wifes Lloyds TSB debit card. A purchase was made with Virgin Atlantic for a ticket priced at £1985. My wife was about to pay for some fuel and the debit card was refused, so she promptly contacted the bank to be told there were insufficient funds because this £1985 transaction was still waiting to clear. The account had around £860 credit with a £300 arranged overdraft, just over £1000 of credit in the account. The bank authorised the payment of £1985 regardless of the fact there were insufficient funds in the account! What happened to the days of bouncing cheques when the account was empty?

The previous fraud had also been on a Lloyds TSB debit card, for around £600, the money was refunded and the card cancelled and a new one issued. This new card was the one that suffered the fraudulent use with Virgin Atlantic, or this is what we thought. If we had stopped at the phone calls to the bank, we probably wouldnt have discovered this until it had happened a few times more...........the £1985 had been taken from the apparently cancelled debit card used in the first fraud of £600!

After speaking to Lloyds TSB, we contacted Virgin Atlantic fraud dept, we wanted to find out how much of my wifes personal info was being used. They found the transaction and many others at that amount on the same day but not the matching card details. After a bit more digging we discovered it had been the old, cancelled debit that had been used. It had also been used for two other unrelated transactions of smaller amounts. All of these transactions had been authorised by somebody in my wifes main branch.

The woman using the card details had tried 15 times to obtain tickets to Lagos on that day using various methods, and had my wifes full name and address and telephone number minus 1 digit. The person is known to Virgin fraud dept and these events and others have been reported to the police, and guess what, it is very rare that anything ever happens and these criminals are able to continue. This was stated by the person dealing with us at Virgin. I will be reporting this to the police myself and hopefully there will be some kind of response?

This may be an isolated incident, but would hazard a guess that it wasnt. Anyway, its very concerning that firstly the bank paid out regardless of the account balance, where is our protection? Secondly they let a cancelled card be used to make purchases. Lloyds TSB will be minus one account by the end of the week!