Around 15 months after my travel card was skimmed, money started disappearing: Tim McIntyre

IT WAS 15 months after Tim McIntyre’s last holiday and the middle of the night when money began disappearing from his travel card account. But how?

IT DOESN’T usually take more than a day or two to find out if a credit or debit card has been compromised, because skimmers get to work straight away, draining as much of your money as they can.

The race is on to shut the card down as quickly as possible and go about getting your money back.

But what if your card had been skimmed and then nothing happened for more than a year, while the thieves lay in wait?

I call it dormant fraud and it happened to me with a Mastercard travel debit card, which I had topped up with funds before heading overseas.

It had been 15 months between foreign journeys and I added a couple of thousand euros to the card a few days before flying out for Ireland.

Around 2am the next morning my phone rang. It was my bank.

My newly cashed up card had been drained of all its fresh funds.

The plundering was happening simultaneously via multiple ATMs across China — somewhere I have never been.

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Sort out holiday money early so there is time to fix any issues.

Apparently my card had been skimmed during a trip to Mexico more than a year earlier and I had not noticed my final 20-odd dollars stolen at that time.

In a display of great work ethic and dedication, the thieves had been vigilantly waiting for me to add more money to it so they could get back to work.

The fact they got me within hours suggests they were either manually checking the balance every day or, more alarmingly, working with enough technological nous to be alerted immediately when money went in.

It must also be a relatively sophisticated international operation, because I struggle to see a link between Mexican retailers and Chinese ATMs.

Luckily, banks are pretty sophisticated themselves these days, so my institution was able to recognise and put a stop to the dodgy withdrawals, but not before 1500 euros were gone.

Of course, I would most likely get the money back, after a 15 day investigation process, which didn’t really help my holiday that was beginning two days later.

Luckily, I was in a position to transfer some extra money from my savings to cover me until the bank reimbursed my losses.

So I went to a branch to get a new card and there was the next problem.

My compromised card couldn’t be shut down while under investigation.

I could have a new card though, which the tellers set up and helped me transfer money onto it.

Booking and paying is easy, but so is card fraud for sophisticated thieves. Picture: iStock.

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Then they informed me it couldn’t be activated until my old one was deactivated!

Which meant I had no working card to go overseas with the following day and no way to activate my money.

This obviously wasn’t acceptable, so it was eventually determined I could keep a secondary card attached to the account my funds were drained from, but accessible via a separate, non-compromised card. It was confusing, but all was well in the end.

The lessons I learnt:

— Sort your money out well in advance, so any hiccups can be sorted out before you actually travel.

— When you return from holidays, either discontinue your card, or keep an eye on the funds for any mysterious transactions. Had I noticed those when I came home after being skimmed in the first place, I could have sorted it out immediately and avoided all the hassle, not to mention the creepy feeling of knowing someone else was accessing my account for more than a year.

Originally published as Around 15 months after my travel card was skimmed, money started disappearing: Tim McIntyre