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47 °F Forecast | Road Cams Tuesday, May 11, 2004 Today's News | Classifieds | Autos | Homes | Jobs | Tempo | Health | Community | Home Delivery SECTIONS Home Page Local News Sports Business Obituaries Life Opinion - Politics AP News Weather Classified Archives Site Map EXTRA Newspaper in Education Personals Movie Times TV Times E The People CLASSIFIEDS Find a Car Find a Home Find a Job Find a Rental Place an ad eSouthernOregon Automotive Communities Entertainment Publications Recreation Calendar CUSTOMER SERVICE Frequent Questions Advertising Information Home Delivery Employment Contact Us Media Kit Network Affiliate Email Story to a Friend April 23, 2004 Credit fraud hurts business Ashland vitamin and supplement store loses when purchaser uses stolen number By JOHN DARLING for the Mail Tribune ASHLAND — After a small store lost several thousand dollars because of fraud, police and banks are warning merchants and Internet shoppers away from transactions with companies in Nigeria and Romania. All’s Well, a vitamin and supplement store, filled orders for $3,000 to $6,000, mostly of Vitamin E, to a Nigerian address and accepted payment on a credit card that registered valid, said owner Jeannie Newfield. Several weeks later, a man called from North Carolina asking how $600 worth of All’s Well charges got on his card, since he hadn’t ordered anything from the store. Only when the card owner learned of the fraud was he able to report the card number (and expiration date) as stolen. In the meantime, all merchants who accepted charges on the card had to absorb those charges. "It’s between $3,000 and $6,000 and, frankly, I’m afraid to look," said Newfield. Ashland fraud detective Brent Jensen said there are two buzz words in fraud work now — Nigeria and Romania — and "you might as well be throwing your money into the street if you deal with anything coming out of those countries." Advertisement Newfield said her bank, Wells Fargo, supplied her with a list of five such countries to be avoided in financial dealings. Credit card numbers, expiration dates and other data are being fraudulently obtained in several ways now, said Jensen, the most common being "skimming," where a merchant or clerk takes your card for charging, but also runs it through a tiny skimmer that reads your data and downloads it later into a computer. "They hand you back your card and you think everything’s OK," said Jensen. "But you don’t find out what’s happened till you get your statement. Meanwhile, they go crazy with it and buy everything they can think of." The cardholder is responsible only for the first $50 used after the card is stolen. Merchants, even though the card shows valid for weeks, must "eat" the rest, he said. A stolen debit card may be used to charge any amount in the account, with the loss falling entirely on the account holder. In addition to being responsible for the charges, All’s Well had to pay shipping of $300 to $500 on many boxes of supplements sent to Nigeria. Why would racketeers want Vitamin E? "Anything you can turn around and sell is a good fraud target — and you can sell Vitamin E, getting good profit because you have no overhead," said Jensen. Phone, e-mail and credit card fraud from Nigeria is a topic at every monthly meeting of the Southern Oregon Financial Fraud and Securities Team, a network of banks and fraud detectives, said Jensen. Banks have learned to do their utmost to prevent customers from writing money orders or wiring funds to Nigeria or other fraud-intensive countries, Jensen said, even to the point of imploring customers to go home and think about it overnight, then calling police in for consultations on the transaction. "As for the Internet, I just would never order anything there," he said, noting that e-racketeers are now "fishing" — sending e-mails complete with eBay and PayPal logos and asking victims to re-submit their financial or credit card data with a new password. Clay Angel, an Ashland pottery shop, was approached by e-mail from Nigeria, asking for shipment of goods, said clerk Sue Morris, but because she’d heard of the All’s Well incident, she deleted the e-mail. It was from Ben—[email protected] Native Nigerian Abraham Jibrin, owner of Sunrise Auto Repair in Central Point, said "because of ripoffs," he would never engage in any financial transactions with anyone in Nigeria and warned Newfield, a friend of his, not to ship the goods until she was paid. With the card unreported as yet, she mistakenly assumed she had been paid. John Darling is a free-lance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at [email protected]. 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