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What can I do if I believe I made a debit card purchase from a fraudulent site

Personal Finance & Money Asked by Bill K on June 24, 2021

I made a purchase (via a debit card but without the PIN, so I believe that falls under credit card rules) and upon further investigation I’m pretty sure the site is fake and will shut down without a trace in a month or so.

I could wait the 2 weeks for them to “Ship”, and at some point in the future I could dispute the charge, but I’m fairly sure they will be closed by then. If they are closed and the credit card company (visa) will still allow a “Charge-back” I’d be fine, but I’m guessing it’s not going to be that easy.

What can I do now (while the store is still collecting charges) to improve my chances of recovering my money if (when) I don’t get my product.

Extra details:

Spelling errors, company location, email address, price, “Items sold” indicator moving back and forth over a small range all indicate that I made an expensive mistake.

The only positive is that they accept credit cards which usually makes you safe, but if they were in china or Russia (The address given is obviously a front) then they can ghost and not pay the charge-back so I’m guessing it will be more difficult for me to recover my money.

Any suggestions (aside from beating me up for being so stupid which I’ve got covered) would be greatly appreciated.

RESULT/follow-up:

We ended up waiting the month or so and then reporting the purchase as a fraud. The credit card company refunded our money after a month or so.

It would have been nice if I could have helped them save themselves the money but at least it wasn’t a problem for me.

2 Answers

Apart from writing to your bank and notifying the e-commerce site (if it's an aggregator, you can also file a complaint with local authorities. Depending on the amount it may or may not make sense.

Answered by Dheer on June 24, 2021

It does not fall under credit card protection. You should never ever use a debit card. By the time the debit card came out congress had been bought by the banks and they stripped out all the consumer protection from these things. Which is why Clark Howard calls them piece of trash fake visas/mastercards for decades. IF you bought with a credit card you can just go online and dispute the charge. In this situation it might be possible to get the cash back in your account but I am not sure.

Good luck and I hope you learned your lesson about debit cards.

FYI I have an ATM card from Chase and Schwab so I never run into this problem and still can get cash.

Answered by Mark Monforti on June 24, 2021

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