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American Express credit cards, scams, refunds
BenCotto
Posts: 4,718
Does anyone have any first hand experience of getting refunds through American Express?
A friend of mine had her email account hacked and all her contacts were then approached asking if they would send electronically a £100 Amazon gift voucher to my “friend’s” niece as it was her birthday and there was a problem with the “friend” accessing her Amazon account. The request was marginally plausible but it didn’t take much thinking to release it was a scam. Two people however fell for it, realised they’d been conned and their banks refunded the money.
A third person, however, was conned out of £100 and then they asked for £50 more and he duly obliged. What a surprise - the promised £150 cheque never arrived and he says that American Express are refusing to reimburse him. Do American Express have a reputation for recalcitrance in matters such as this?
The person conned out of £150 is very cross with my friend and expects her to repay him the £150. At my insistence my friend has basically told this man to rearrange these three words: bike, on, your.
Would you be surprised to learn that friendship between these two people is now severed?
A friend of mine had her email account hacked and all her contacts were then approached asking if they would send electronically a £100 Amazon gift voucher to my “friend’s” niece as it was her birthday and there was a problem with the “friend” accessing her Amazon account. The request was marginally plausible but it didn’t take much thinking to release it was a scam. Two people however fell for it, realised they’d been conned and their banks refunded the money.
A third person, however, was conned out of £100 and then they asked for £50 more and he duly obliged. What a surprise - the promised £150 cheque never arrived and he says that American Express are refusing to reimburse him. Do American Express have a reputation for recalcitrance in matters such as this?
The person conned out of £150 is very cross with my friend and expects her to repay him the £150. At my insistence my friend has basically told this man to rearrange these three words: bike, on, your.
Would you be surprised to learn that friendship between these two people is now severed?
Rutland, England
0
Posts
I don't see how the person expects your friend to reimburse them, but I don't think Amex has to do so either.
I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...
B.Johnson at btinternet.com
while the scammer used
B.Johnson at gmail.com
It would be easy to be taken in. However the use of ‘cell phone’, ‘gotten’ and ‘good to go’ should have set alarm bells ringing.
[email protected]
As @Lyn says - if you look at the sender's email address, you can see right away that they're phoney.
I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...
I don’t take anything as face value on the internet.
Email is a very insecure, 50+ year old technology. Like much of the internet, it was never built with security in mind. Creating fake emails is simple; there are several technical parts to an email that are used to produce the end result you see in your inbox, and all of them can be easily manipulated. There are overlaying technologies and solutions developed over the last 10+ years to improve email security, but understanding how they work/whether they've been applied to a specific given email is probably nigh on impossible for the average person.
Alternatively, as BenCotto's friend has discovered, if your email account is hacked it doesn't matter what solutions are used, the email will appear to be genuine because - in strict technology terms - it is.
Simply, if you get any kind of email, text message (yes, SMS can be faked easily), instant message, social media message, or any kind of request asking you to exchange money etc, just pick up the phone and ask the requestor if it's genuine. Do not simply trust a message via any technology medium, because I guarantee it could be faked in a way a non-expert cannot identify. Asking someone to confirm is the only reliable check, and do it by voice, not by email, so I can identify you - if your email is hacked then an attacker can simply intercept an email-borne check.
@Fairygirl I appreciate your sentiment for forwarding mail to that address, but you don't need to do it. Global email, cybersecurity and internet providers have aggregate threat feeds to identify all this stuff. Rest assured that if you've received malicious mail, they already know about it!