Friday, January 26, 2007

The Saga of the Credit Card - 2

After the initial shock had worn off, a couple of interesting things happened in the last two days.

Firstly, I was surprised to find a comment on my earlier blog assuring me on behalf of MMT that the issue would be resolved and I would not have to pay the charges! Later in the evening, I was pleasantly surprised to find that makemytrip.com's finance manager, Abhishek, had made that comment - when asked how he came to my blog, he replied that they subscribed to the appropriate Google alerts to make sure they were in touch with what people were saying about MMT! I like that attitude - very positive! :)

Anyway, so Abhishek assured me that they were trying to nail down the culprits - apparently, they have come across some other cards that have been used, and all of them happen to be from around the Pune area. We discussed possible places where the cards could have been copied... however, later I realised, it's not that difficult at all. Any place you swap, already has information about your name and card number, and expiry date. All they need is to note down the 3 digit authorization number on the back! So one lesson from this - scratch out the auth number from the back of the card, and you can prevent a lot more frauds on your card.

Next morning, I happened to read the TOI, and there was an article on the fraud - the exact same situation, where someone has apparently been using multiple credit cards, to do the same thing as they did with me - book airline tickets! Wierd - I would assume that booking airline tickets would easily expose you (through the passengers who could be easily tracked at the airport). But then, I guess there's not much you can buy online in India right now anyway!

Now I need to fax across a Customer Dispute Form to ICICI, and wait for the "maximum 60 days" for the dispute to be resolved. And wait and see how MMT and ICICI go about "resolving" this issue - does it only cancel the tickets and give me back my money, or does it have the wherewittal to go after the culprits and bring them to book!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great to see your blog being read by the right person, good use of blogs!

All the best to you for this credit card stuff.