>A common scam is to make small charges on a lot of cards. >Yeah, check your bills! Another version of this is the user of the stolen card will figure what a stores floor limit is likely to be and then spend just under that - more so in the past where there had to be a human call to the next authority up the chain when the floor limit was exceeded. Harder to do now the transaction goes electronically back to a clearing house and automatically checked against a stolen card list. My wife used to work in a MasterCard office, and they were always getting complaints from liquor stores about the very low floor limit they were given. In the last few months the UK has moved to so called "chip and pin" cards. We used ours in Germany for fuel at autobahn rest stops, and the card got put in the machine the amount entered, and the card handed back to us. Didn't need to know the pin number .... But the fraudsters are still having a field day with chip and pin cards. They get the details by eavesdropping on the wireless card entry devices AFAICT, send the details to confederates in USA an Canada, who make a card and go spending ... they don't need a pin over there because the system isn't as wide spread. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist