Did Adele Services Charge Your Credit Card? The Company Does Not Exist
The Boston Globe says that credit card users are noticing a mysterious charge for about 25 cents from Adele Services in Melville, NY. The trouble is, "There is no business by that name listed in Melville, or registered to any business anywhere in New York, for that matter." No one knows yet whether these small charges are tests for larger unauthorized debits, or if this is the entire scam. Either way, check your statement and be sure to file a dispute—and request a new card—if you come across it.
"Mysterious credit card charge may have hit millions of users" [Boston Globe] (Thanks to Klay!)
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Comments:
@Writer, TheNinjaReport: Not only that, but I'm sure a lot of people don't scan their statements well enough to catch a 25 cent charge. Had it been significantly more, most would notice, but 25 cents is likely to be missed entirely.
Holy Hell, it's the scam from Office Space in real life.
Maybe this is just naive of me, but presumably since we all know about Adele Services being fake and making 25 cent charges, the credit card companies also know. It doesn't strike me as a difficult task to run some kind of report to figure out who was affected and contact those customers about getting new account numbers rather than assume they'll all find out and wait for them to call. Wouldn't being proactive here save credit card companies money in the long run because they won't have to eat larger, fraudulent charges and do numerous individual account investigations later?
If I were a scammer, I'd charge a $1.00. Or $2.00. When I see flat fees in those amounts on my debit account, I tend to automatically think they're ATM-related charges. Or SOME sort of transaction fee for a purchase or balance transfer or something. But $0.25? THAT would set off a bigger alarm in my head.
Autodialer: "Greetings, friend! Do you want eternal happiness? Then send $1.00 to Happy Guy. 314* Evergreen Terrace. Hurry! Eternal happiness is only a dollar away!"
Mr. Burns: "Hmmm... eternal happiness for a dollar. Eh. I'd be happier with the dollar."
*I'm ashamed to admit I can't recall the Simpsons' address by memory. The Griffins' is easy: 31 Spooner St.
@chucklebuck: Better yet, the CC companies ought to be denying any charges from Adele Services. Sure, the criminals will just come up with another name, but just once I'd like to see some real initiative from the CC cos.
About 10 to 12 years ago, I started getting this $8.95 (?) charge on my credit card. It came from nowhere. The card was an AT&T Mastercard. The listing on the bill had a phone number with the last two numbers left off. I disputed it, and they took the charge off. Next month, same thing. The Mastercard people couldn't tell me who this was. They took it off again. Month three, same thing--and Mastercard told me that they couldn't remove the charge again, that I'd have to report the card STOLEN to stop these charges! Then a little 'net research showed a BUNCH of people nationwide getting the exact same thing. And the credit card companies "couldn't do anything about it". It was low enough to catch the stupid people who never reconcile their bills, and that's a large number. Someone made off with a lot of cash back then. This is no news--it's been going on for more years than most readers here have had a credit card.
(guest because i'm short on time) This happened to several places here in East TN last month. My mother's company noticed a small charge from Adele, then a larger one (couple thousand) that was on hold. Seems "Adele" has gotten hold of some credit card numbers, puts through a small charge to see if they're active, then pulls a punch.
Careful guys..
@BlackMage is doing the Time Warp agaaaaaaain!!!: You shouldn't worry about it. The emo kids who don't know where Fallout Boy and Evergreen Terrace got their names are the ones who should be ashamed. And there were a lot that came through the record Store when I worked there.
A while back there was a porn vendor accepting some sort of micro-payment for $0.25.
Wonder if somebody forget their most recent porn purchase?
@CyrusOpeth: I think you are right about that. I recall reading (maybe on Consumerist???)about the (insert name of a former eastern block country) mob setting up a huge number of independent, autonomous, cc scam/hacker rings with layers upon layers of keylogger infected websites with independent cc card processing sites again all in a stand alone fashion that specifically targeted accounts like you described and the 25cent deal above. This was perfected to such an extent that it was compared to an industrial production line and supposedly the FBI et al knew about it but couldn't pin anything down.
As soon as people called the bogus company charging them, the company would immediately refund the money so that there would not be a pattern of chargebacks and they could continue the scam with that processing center. The bogus CC billing was for some sort of online book download, if I remember correctly. The guy who wrote about it was writing on a forum site and described this in great detail...
What's even scarier is that I live in Huntington, NY. Melville is a town within Huntington and I'd never have even known that the charge was illegitimate.
@larrymac808: Even better still, in order for these people to get paid for these card charges, they HAVE to have a merchant account of some kind. It would be easy for the card companies to see where these payments were going and obtain the necessary information from, or get in contact with, the merchant account provider. Charges would obviously follow.
Hacker networks are getting more and more elaborate as time goes on and this might be the next generation of attack. Face it if you can get .25 from a million people that's 250k with very little risk and most people may not even know they've been scammed. A charge of $10 or even $20 would only need 10-20k people but is much more likely to get flagged and shut down or disputed.
They are probably testing to see at what level CC security starts to kick in. .25 today could be 1.22 tomorrow with 10 million CC numbers.
I got hit with a 23-cent charge from Adele Services on my debit card a couple months ago. Luckily, I spotted it the day after it went through, did a quick Google and found some other folks who were hit, too. Called the bank, canceled and replaced the card, and haven't seen anymore Adele charges. Keeping my eyes peeled, though.
Now if I could just stop those car warranty spam calls on my cellphone!
Does anyone know the merchant ID they are using?
From Ripoff Reports. Don't know whether it's just a registrar in Melville though:
ADELE SERVICES
68 South Service
Melville, NY 11747 US
Domain name: ADELESERVICES.COM
Administrative Contact: THOMAS, PHILIP 68 South Service Melville, NY 11747 US +1.8005789641
Technical Contact: THOMAS, PHILIP 68 South Service Melville, NY 11747 US +1.8005789641
What is up with using an old Commerce Check Card picture for a non commerce/td story? At least use the new green td cards or the updated commerce card layout from march of 07.
Yeah this is a big one, because so far no one hit wit the 25 cent charge has gotten a bigger one, but you never know if that'll happen. And even though it's only 25 cents, it's important to dispute it and close the card because it's more likely that it's an attempt to get money from millions of people, and people are likely to ignore 25 cents because they think it's not worth disputing.