T-Mobile in pre-pay fraud shocker

Link: T-Mobile hit by top up scam
IT/Tech website The Inquirer are reporting that T-Mobile are having some slight ‘issues’ to do with pre-paid top-ups and credit card fraud.

Apparently a reader contacted the website after discovering a fraudulent £40 payment on his credit card statement – which was quite impressive as he isn’t even a T-Mobile customer.

Reputedly the agent in T-Mobile’s help centre sounded very familiar with the situation and suggested that the company was currently experiencing problems with fraudulent top ups.

One of the problems with pre-paid is that the networks don’t actually know who the real owner of the handset is. It seems that T-Mobile’s online sign up system for topping up doesn’t even require a postal address.

The article speculates that “the system isn’t checking credit card numbers against a postal address when adding top ups”.

It’s all a bit ironic really that Ewan seems to be having so much trouble giving T-Mobile money from his debit card – yet they’ll quite happily let scammers top up their pre-pay accounts with a stolen card.