A person's rights if a victim of credit card fraud?

DL32

Thanks all.

Trying to find out what laws or regulations specifically the company has to abide by?

Terry_Towelling

Ben8282 wrote: »

After checking the start date of the replacement debit card, I can confirm this was Jun or Jul 2016.
Your post would imply that this is no longer possible. If so, pleased to hear it.

I believe MSE campaigned to force all contactless payments to go online for auth and this came into card scheme rules quite recently. I think there was a news article on the credit cards board. In theory this now means all post-block fraud should be stopped but it has somewhat eroded the original benefits of the contactless payment method by increasing transaction completion times to potentially more than a standard CHIP & off-line PIN transaction.

Terry_Towelling

DL32 wrote: »

Thanks all.

Trying to find out what laws or regulations specifically the company has to abide by?

Your first port of call is still the card company's T&Cs.

eddddy

DL32 wrote: »

I had a card that was swallowed by an ATM, and reported it a couple of days later, by which time some fraud had occurred on my card. I was denied a refund for reporting too late - I did not consider ATM retention as lost or stolen, and was abroad at the time, so wanted to wait until home to report it/ask for a new card.

If it's a credit card (credit-token) as opposed to a debit card, the law limits your liability for unauthorised transactions to £50.

And the Financial Ombudsman confirms this.

(Banks have clauses in their T&Cs about 'Gross Negligence' etc - but the law overrides them.)

Here's some extracts from the relevant legislation (but you need to read all the exclusions as well) :

Consumer Credit Act 1974

83 Liability for misuse of credit facilities.

(1)The debtor under a regulated consumer credit agreement shall not be liable to the creditor for any loss arising from use of the credit facility by another person not acting, or to be treated as acting, as the debtor’s agent.

84 Misuse of credit-tokens.

(1)Section 83 does not prevent the debtor under a credit-token agreement from being made liable to the extent of [F126£50] (or the credit limit if lower) for loss to the creditor arising from use of the credit-token by other persons during a period beginning when the credit-token ceases to be in the possession of any authorised person and ending when the credit-token is once more in the possession of an authorised person.

Link: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/39/2016-03-01

And here's confirmation from the Financial Ombudsman:

Where the Consumer Credit Act, the banking code and the account terms do not say the same thing:

• the act takes precedence over the code and the account terms; and
• the code takes precedence over the account terms.

So because the act says that liability for unauthorised use of a credit-token is limited to £50, a firm cannot use the cardholder’s negligence in caring for the card and security information as its grounds for seeking to make the cardholder liable for more than £50.

Cardholders are only liable for losses of more than £50 if they:

• made the transaction; or
• authorised someone else to make it.

But they can be made liable for:

• losses arising from the use of a credit-token by someone who obtained possession of it with the cardholder’s consent; and
• the first £50 of any losses caused by the cardholder’s gross negligence in the care of their card or security details.

Link: https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/publications/ombudsman-news/46/46_plastic_cards.htm

Sncjw

Do you not think it’s fishy that you had taken two days to report it. To the card company they will think that you are wanting your money back on item you bought

elsien

Ben8282 wrote: »

They did! My understanding is that even when a contactless offline debit card is blocked, if it is used for a transaction below the floor limit in an offline chip/pin terminal, as the terminal does not 'call out; the transaction will go through until the terminal has updated with whatever info it is updated with to prevent this happening further. I wont name the places where the card was used but it was two household name places where low value transactions do not appear as pending transactions and one other place.
Perhaps somebody with a professional understanding could elaborate further?
After checking the start date of the replacement debit card, I can confirm this was Jun or Jul 2016.
Your post would imply that this is no longer possible. If so, pleased to hear it.

This was certainly the case fairly recently - my card was blocked but I didn't realise straight away as I could still use it for contactless. It was only when I tried and was declined for a large purchase I found out there was a problem - the provider hadn't contacted me to let me know.

DL32

Sorry, not to card savvy. It was a debit card, I think, as it was from a bank.

Terry_Towelling

elsien wrote: »

This was certainly the case fairly recently - my card was blocked but I didn't realise straight away as I could still use it for contactless. It was only when I tried and was declined for a large purchase I found out there was a problem - the provider hadn't contacted me to let me know.

Whilst the Zero Floor Limit for contactless is now in the card-scheme rules (I believe) it is equally possible that some retailers haven't implemented it and that some never will. Compliance with card-scheme rules is not always enforced; rather it is left to individual acquirers/retailers to decide whether they want to comply or take the risk of sanctions. Those sanctions usually come in the form of Chargebacks for non-compliant transactions where the card issuer has been unable to collect the debt because of fraud or bad-debt.

Some very powerful retailers may dictate to their acquirers that they want a contactless Floor Limit above Zero, and the acquirers will probably allow this so as to not lose the retailer's business, and on the condition that any chargebacks for non-compliance will be passed on to the retailer. They will also probably be required to download an Exception File into their POS systems that lists blocked cards and can be updated daily.

It all comes down to 'risk' and balancing that against the time/cost lost due to lengthening the transaction-completion time with an authorisation request. Customers who are inconvenienced by a bit of fraud (that they won't have to pay for) will (sadly) just be collateral damage.

Terry_Towelling

DL32 wrote: »

Sorry, not too card savvy. It was a debit card, I think, as it was from a bank.

Now this is a bit scary and exposes a potential chink in the thread.

OP, a debit card is used to access your own money from your bank account. A credit card doesn't do this. A credit card provider will pay the transactions for you and put all of your spending in a list and present it to you monthly (usually) and ask you to pay them for all of the transactions you have made. You can choose to pay it all at once or you can choose to pay part of it and incur an interest charge.

In your opening post you were quite clearly looking for information on credit card fraud. Is there anything else you'd like to say at this point?

Ben8282

DL32 wrote: »

Sorry, not to card savvy. It was a debit card, I think, as it was from a bank.

You think? Even somebody who is not 'card savvy' should know which of their cards was retained!