One of Those

Customer-services-wise, it’s been one of those weekends again…

While driving home on Friday evening, the windscreen got hit right on the edge by a stone, and cracked. Obviously the impact speed must’ve been fairly high, and it caught at just the right point, so it’s a fairly significant crack, and one that would almost certainly fail the MOT test (which thankfully is no time soon)

So when I got home I called the car insurance’s glass repair/replace number, and organised getting the windscreen replaced. (A fix isn’t going to be feasible, it’s new windscreen time) That all went ok, until we got to their next available appointment.  Which was… May 9th.  Yep, three weeks time, to replace a windscreen.  Safe to say, not happy.  I went back to the insurance company direct, explained why I wasn’t happy with that – I don’t even want to think about what would happen if I were in an accident while the windscreen were damaged. I’m willing to bet that they’d deny the claim, even with having the appointment in place, and the insurance company informed.   They’re like that.

Anyway, they gave me a different number to call. Same company, different number, and as soon as I was speaking to them, suddenly a slot came free for a week’s time, rather than three. How amazing.

So it’s lined up to be sorted this coming weekend.  I’m still not entirely happy about it, but it’s better than waiting nearly a month (because of other things, the replacement would actually have been another week after the ‘first available’ slot…) for it to be done.

Then today, I looked at my business account online, and there’s a couple of transactions I don’t recognise, and know I haven’t made. I call the bank, get them recorded as fraudulent, get the money back and so on.  And that’s all OK.

But.  But.   The pattern of these transactions was precisely the pattern that’s used in fraudulent transactions.  Two small (or smallish) transactions, this time both at the very top of the contactless transaction limit, in very quick succession, with a company I haven’t dealt with before.  And then, within twenty-four hours, another large-value transaction, also with a company I haven’t dealt with in a while.  That’s the absolute fingerprint for a fraud transaction – the first two check the card’s validity etc., the second is to make sure it hasn’t triggered systems or been registered as stolen, and then they try to profit from it.

As it turns out, in my case the big transaction was a valid one, but that doesn’t change the issue.

So that pattern of three transactions should have triggered every automatic fraud detection system, and put a hold on my card that would’ve then been dealt with during the big transaction. That’s what’s happened before with the same bank, the same account – except they were valid transactions that just happened to be in that order.  And no-one can currently tell me why it’s not been triggered this time.

I’m not harmed in either case. I’ve got the money back, I’ll be getting a new card, and everything’s fine.  I’ve raised a complaint about it, and I’m pretty sure that absolutely nothing will happen with it.

But yeah, the two things over three days, it all just gets a bit wearing, I could do with not having to deal with it.

Ah well. Fun and games.