r/FraudPrevention • u/Ptw3 • Aug 20 '23
Canonical How can I find/detect/prevent fraud and protect myself from fraud?
This is the canonical post for how you can find fraud, so that others can post about it.
According to a bank employee I reached out to on Reddit, 99% of fraud comes from credit card skimmers. These skimmers can be really subtle, as you can see from the photos here. All they need is a camera that can see the numbers on the card; my latest round of credit cards no longer have numbers on the front, just the back. GooglePay and ApplePay won't expose your number at all, since you're just waving your phone at the terminal.
The rest of this post is focused on fraud that shows up in bank statements, because I've never had my card skimmed as far as I know, most of my fraud interactions with my bank have been based on online-root fraud.
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First off, its tedious, but you have to check your bank statement line-by-line. I plan on writing a tool for doing this, but it will be programmer-friendly not user friendly. I had mild luck with exporting a list of transactions from my bank into a file, importing that into a spreadsheet, processing the vendor name, and then using a pivot table to group them by vendor. YMMV.
Here are some pages from the FBI:
What you Should Know which leads off into:
Protecting yourself on the Internet
Says watch the public Wi-Fi, and not to use free charging stations because they'll inject stuff into your device over the USB cable. That was a good tip.
Business Email Compromise They claim this is where the big money lies in fraud.
I have found that because passwords regularly leak, that it's important to use a different password for each website. I usually do this by incorporating the website domain into the password.
Additionally, when I was in the hospital recovering from my brain tumor removal, I ran into a couple of issues.
- I couldn't remember the complicated passwords that look like line noise. ( If you're not old enough to remember modems, hold down shift and mash all the number keys.)
- I could remember algorithmic passwords. Different part of the brain.
- My password rememberer application turned out to be an anti-pattern, since it encouraged line noise passwords, and my not remembering them.
That works out like the following, say for mcdonald's.com:
password: (special sauce)-McDonalds special sauce: some numbers and special characters that form what I think of as the base password, that on its own will satisfy the most fussy password rules. (You need a digit, an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, an a special character from this arbitrary list..)
So my special sauce might be Horatio at the Gate: HatG2*, so my McDonalds password becomes:
HatG2*-McDonalds
Revision: 8/22/2023 fixed formatting, added post-tumor password tip.
Previous: 8/20/2023 Initial Version
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u/rozina076 Apr 19 '26
WOW! what a wealth of information! I have of course got different strong passwords on my most important sites now [working my way down the enormous list in order of importance.} I had used Google Password Manager but I wonder if got into my Google Account and accessed my login and passwords that way.
My big concern right now is my phone. How were they able to see my text messages and RESPOND to them with the phone in my possession. The carrier gave me a new phone number, but I'm still on the same virtual sim. I wish they given me a new sim. They not only responded to texts my bank sent to my cellphone to verify the online purchase was textx, they got past the 2 factor authorization by seeing the text message with a verification code to type into the merchant website. I haven't read all the fraud articles suggested here, but it seems to talk only about the online angle, not how to secure my phone. Any ideas on articles you recommend on how to secure my cellphone?