Capital One Fraudsters Preying on the International Help Line

I unintentionally found an interesting fraud tactic being used on Capital One cardholders about six months ago. If you misdial their international calling center (i.e. dial 1-800-934-2001 instead of 1-804-934-2001) you get a fraudster call center that will ask for all your account details, including some PII. It’s the telephonic equivalent of cybersquatting – where a bad site designed to steal your data has a barely misspelled URL of a well-known site that receives a lot of traffic. 

I can’t say I was smart enough to hang up midway. I can say I was smart enough to immediately call the U.S. number to freeze the card and send a sort of incident report to Capital One. 

I had hoped it would end there but a month later the fraudsters had succeeded in extracting funds….using check fraud.

Capital One fraudsters employ check fraud

After taking a long vacation with my girlfriend, I got back to read my Capital One bank statement to be oh so unpleasantly surprised to see a check-based withdrawal on my account. The problems?

1) I don’t even own a checkbook for that account

2) The digital version of the check showed my surname was misspelled.

3) The digital version of the check showed that the check had an incorrect residential address.

Of course, I called up Capital One. This time I reached out to their stolen debit card line, NOT their credit card line.

I explained to them like I had to the credit card people at Capital One the month before that I had been scammed by fraudsters running a fake call center pretending to be Capital One and that I had provided my credit card info, bank account and routing number.

This time, the call rep didn’t wave off the possibility that the fraudsters would target my bank account (like the original credit card call rep had), as they had obviously done exactly that.

Capital One ‘investigates’ my bank account

Instead, they froze my bank account and put it under investigation after moving the remaining funds into a new bank account. It then sat there for almost six months until I called to withdraw the funds and shut down the old account as irreparably compromised.

And while I have no illusions that the scammers will spend any jail time over this, I do hope Capital One puts in the effort to close down the fraudster’s phone line. Stay tuned as I seek comment from Capital One spokespeople on this matter.