avoid doing business with dell

[rone]

A friend had his credit card number stolen after a site he used was cracked. His bank rep told him that two of the charges had gone through because, even though they'd received "Confiscate card: stolen" notifications, they nonetheless ran the charges through. One of them was dell.com. The rep went on to say that Dell is the king of credit card fraud — they do no address checking or any sort of verification. He also said that nearly every card he dealt with in November had Dell charges.

Comments

Re: hacker protection

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I know AmEx does that, but i've never tried it. I should definitely consider investigating it, and see if my MasterCard has it, too.

Thanks for the e-mail hint. I'll see if i can follow through and re-register to vote tomorrow.

Re: hacker protection (reposted, changed to anon from my username)

[(Anonymous)]

I use a shopsafe method by my Visa bank where I never, ever give out my real card number for an internet or phone purchase. This method generates a unique Visa number, expiration date and CVV verification number (the number on the back of your card) for each transaction; you set a limit and it can't be exceeded. Only the vendor you purchase from will be able to use that card number and they never know your real number. It is somehow recognized by your visa account and appears on your bill. If a hacker or some fraudulent employee steals the number, they can't do a thing with it. I love it. The only problems with it are that a couple of places don't work quite right with it. I've heard that AOL has problems with it because they communicate wrong to the shopsafe people different one month from another and it has to be the SAME vendor identifying code sent or the shopsafe thing will reject it. I hear that booking flights through orbitz or something with a name like that ends up causing two charges and the second one with a different vendor (the airline) doesn't go through so the person has to arrange to do another generated number for the second one after the screw up. But for most situations, it works without a hitch. It can have up to a one year limit and most vendors can do a monthly billing (like if you have to pay an IP $99 a year in monthly increments, you set a $99 limit and it bills $7.95 a month automatically, unless it's a problem place like AOL). I wouldn't even think of doing internet stuff any other way.

The only place I could be hurt is if they successfully hack the bank running the program and get the real card number. But that's the only place online that has my true card number. No vendor has it or ever will. I used to do phone orders with my real card, but no more.

p.s. about the previous thread, yes, you'll get postal spam when you register for a political party. However, I put a stop to it by insisting they only send it to me via email. Somehow or another it worked after I bitched enough. I have an email addy where I receive such stuff. A ton of it, mind you.
---

Besides Amex, MBNA also does it. Not sure how many credit card banks do. -lisa