Potential Fraud

While we were in Cambridge over the weekend, we went out for a meal at La Tasca.

When it came time to pay, I handed over my Switch (Sorry, Maestro) card for the transaction. Having keyed in my PIN, the waitress waited by our table for a couple of minutes, then wandered off with the card still in the machine. She came back a couple of minutes later with another card machine, showed me the “transaction cancelled” slip, and asked me to put the transaction through again on the other card reader.

Needless to say, alarm bells went “Rinnnnggggg!” in my brain.

We went through the transaction again, and all went well. And then we left the restaurant.

At which point, I called the bank and cancelled the card completely. I explained why, that I felt it was a dodgy transaction, and while I had no problem with the transaction for the meal bill going through, I didn’t want anything else going through on that card. The lady from the bank agreed that it sounded dodgy, cancelled the card immediately, ordered a new one, and said they’d raise a flag against La Tasca in Cambridge, just in case there were other issues in the future for their other customers. (Whether they will or not, I’ve no idea)

I’m sure that it was just me being extra-paranoid, but at the same time I’d rather be slightly inconvenienced by a few days without a Switch card than by being complacent, thinking I’m just being paranoid and then having to deal with discovering that money had been taken from my bank account by fraudulent transactions.