SECURITY WARNING... and PSA

If you see on your bank statement a pending charge for $39.99USD with a name of a website which will generally be six letters, in my case it was VNTHMD.COM 

under no circumstances contact the website to query the charge.. I do not know how these people got the details to make the charge as I had not used my card in a while - but they did.

These people from what I can tell are Smishing. This is the practice of putting through a pending charge that won't stick in order to obtain details from you which they can then use for nefarious ends including making actual charges to your credit card.

When talking to them they try and obtain the first 6 and the last 4 digits for your credit card.

Your full name and any other details that they can in order that when they do put through further charges - they will appear to be legit, they also on sell this information to other criminals.

Things of note: they tell you that you were being charged for a membership but they can not tell you what that membership was for saying that their system does not have access to that information which is ludicrous, it is a legal requirement for companies such as this to maintain a transaction Audit log. It does not matter what you do or say they will not give you the information because there is no membership.

Now I can't say what gives them away as a fraud because it is currently being used to track down multiple copies of this exact same website with different names but the same chat support staff and I don't want that information getting into the wild and them changing it, needless to say read the screen and ask yourself does this sound like the correct way that someone would make this statement in English.

What you should do... Even though it is a massive inconvenience you don't want them making charges against your card and possibly slipping them past you because you have not noticed.

Ring your bank, have a stop put on the card.

Check and report any untoward transactions, if you are unsure if you made a transaction or not it does not hurt to ask - "what is this for"

Have a new credit card issued.

Last but not least, be vigilant and be safe with your information.

Edited by hamluis, 24 July 2023 - 10:19 AM.
Moved from Gen Chat to Tips/Tricks - Hamluis.

I get these e-mails of things being charged to my credit cards.  Big surprise, I have no credit cards.  I eliminated them when I ran  up $30K on six different cards while raising a family.  Paid them off in three years in 1990 and have not had a card since.  

Edited by mjd420nova, 24 July 2023 - 09:47 AM.

Well that's one way to deal with it. in this instance though it wasn't an E-Mail or a text it is literally a pending charge showing on your bank statement, that is the clever part - they get you to come to them.

This was the first one I had ever had in my 53 years, in my research though I have found out it was a more common occurrence than I thought it would be.

Apparently the initial charge is charged to the card number and card numbers are literally a numeric calculation which can generally be checked using a modulo, if the result is 0 the number is valid - they don't have to know who they are charging all they have is the generated card number.

They fire a charge against the number and when you come back to them on their support site - that's the gotcha moment.

So me asking who made the charge against my card was pointless as it was literally them, they just didn't know they were charging me.

Edited by VaultDweller, 26 July 2023 - 07:23 AM.

This is a clever fraud attempt.  But whatever, being a pre-approval or an actual purchase, and being on a credit card or a debit card, always call the card issuer and tell them this is a fraud.  The inscription will disappear as fast as it came.

By the way, I had such a random charge some years ago.  It vanished from my account after alerting the bank.

VaultDweller, I learned a lot from your post, thanks for bringing it up.

Another way to avoid all surprises:

1. check frequently used accounts daily to catch those "pending" charges immediately

2. create a financial hygiene routine weekly-check every single credit card to see if new charges were made

3. use multiple credit monitoring sites, some are better than others. Credit Sesame has been instantaneous with inquiries.

Strange things can happen with bank postings. A legitimate charge may not appear immediately, or an illegitimate charge can show up pronto.To avoid the unexpected, whether weeks later or days later, keep tabs on a regular basis. If it comes to you anyway, follow the steps outlined above.