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Late this afternoon while snoozing on the couch, I received a phone call from a lady asking if I purchased an HP notebook computer this morning.  I told her I didn’t and she asked if I had a Visa ending in ‘####’ to which I confirmed.  She then advised me to call up the credit card company to cancel my card and even provided me their number.  The only problem was the number she gave me didn’t match the number on the back of my card.  I called my credit card company using the # on the back of my card and reported this incident to them and sure enough, there was a charge made for a $1300 notebook from hpshopping.com made at 12:30 PM.  First off, I was asleep when this transaction occurred.  Second, I have a fully loaded dell 700m which I couldn’t be happier with, and third, it was on a credit card I use infrequently and strictly use for Amazon purchases.  Now I’m thinking about who the lady was that called me.  I’m a pretty active online shopper and purchasing an abundance of computer hardware is not out of the norm for me so what was it about that particular transaction that prompted an inquiry over the phone.  I have a couple theories.

1) The lady works for HPShopping.com and something about the transaction raised some flags over the veracity of the charge, maybe the shipping address not matching up with the billing.  Hence, the phone inquiry.

2) The lady is in on the scam.  She provides me a fake cust serv # so I would call up a fake cust serv department and provide them even more details about myself when they ask, as most CC companies do, for my mother’s maiden name, SS#, DOB, etc.  This would take their identity theft to another level — creating CC#s under my name with a bogus billing address / phone # that I would have a hard time finding out about.