Spam Blasting Credit Card Scam!

One of our founders, Cary Marger, was recently the subject of a credit card scam called Spam Blasting. We want to share the story of how he was able to quickly react to the scam to prevent further damage. Let this serve as a valuable lesson about being hyper vigilant with your personal data.

While sitting at home at night, Cary noticed his Gmail inbox suddenly getting bombarded by spam. Hundreds of e-mails per minute were flooding his inbox. Most of them were from mailing lists from around the world in various languages. He immediately began marking each one as Spam. During that tedious process, he noticed an email from a name-brand travel agency regarding a recent flight booking. At this point, Cary checked his credit card activity and noticed a $400 charge for an airline ticket booked on the very same travel agency! Within seconds, he called the credit card company, informing them of the fraudulent charge. The charge was flagged as fraud, the card number was frozen, and they issued him a new credit card number within minutes.

This specific type of Spam Blasting scam is called “List Linking”. The scammer will sign you up for thousands of mailing lists, newsletters, etc. Within minutes, your inbox gets blasted with all the spam, hoping that you miss an important email regarding fraudulent charges. Luckly, Cary’s quick thinking prevented the charge (and future charges) from going through.

So, if you ever find yourself getting spam blasted, just know that there might be a fraudulent use of your credit card somewhere in the confusion! Remain vigilant!