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Home >> Scams/Fraud
Stopping Fraud in its Tracks
My bank, new bank since the Federal Government sold mine off to them, had a computer call me because they suspected a fraudulent transaction. It was, and I found two more that had been approved and were pending. Someone had copied my Visa debit card and used it at two stores for almost $300. Luckily, that was not going to cause any problems for me if they cleared, but I advised the fraud department that they were not my purchases. All I wanted from them at that point was to cancel the hold on the funds and erase the pending status. I had filed a police report and offered then the report number.
They refused to cancel them and told me I had to wait for them to clear and call them back to file a fraud claim again. They then told me once I did that, they would temporarily return the money to me as long as I filled out all of the paperwork they sent me. I tried explaining they were only compounding the problem by letting what they knew were fraudulent transactions to go through. I wanted them to stop them at that point, with the police report readily available.
Finally, after talking to three different people, the fraud representative said it was illegal for them to stop pending transaction, and I would just have to let them clear. That was what I was forced to do and then waited a week without the money for the bank to credit the amount back to my account. I would like to know if it is actually illegal to stop a pending transaction when they have an account owner verifying the fraud and submitting a police report?
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 Once the transactions were approved by the bank, which would have preceded the computer's call to you, they were authorized and had to be posted to your account. However, from that point on, the bank handled things a bit clumsily. That you had to file paperwork for the bank to attempt shipping the transactions back is accurate, and your claim would not be valid until after the transactions had hit your account.
However, it is clear that the bank had agreed the transactions were unauthorized from the moment you contacted them; therefore, there was no reason for them to delay recrediting your account on a permanent basis for the transactions once it had the posted transactions and your claim , which could have been made orally. Additionally, the credit to your account should not have been temporary if the bank already knew you didn't authorize the entries. It sounds like the bank thinks it can collect the money back from you if its attempt to recover the funds from the system fail. Based on the information you've supplied, that's just not the case. Whether or not the bank can recover the funds has nothing to do with its obligation to return funds to your account. Make sure you get a brand new card and that the old card is "hot listed" with Visa to prevent its further use.
Published on BankingQuestions.com 10/08/09
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