Fraud!

On a whim today I logged into one of my bank accounts to check the balance. It was about $50 less than I expected so I started to scroll down to see what charges had been made.

I came to a charge on July 7 for $1.95 from “RKNETHELPCOM”. Then a few lines farther was another charge for $23.95 from “APROSUPPORT.COM”, also on July 7. Then another on July 9 for $26.91, again from “RKNETHELPCOM”.

I had never seen these before, so I looked them up and guess what I found?

Evidently, these companies are all affiliated under an umbrella company called “Carson Co” or something similar and they are part of a Pornography empire. I knew for certain then that I did not make those charges so I called the Fraud department.

While I was on hold I was reading into it more and found that my story is very similar to many others and that some of them had their accounts go into overdraft because of these automatic charges.

While on the phone with the fraud operator we were talking about how sometimes a program is used to randomly insert credit card numbers and charge a small amount of money to them until one goes through. When they get through, they then discreetly charge smaller amounts until they get found out. Sometimes they don’t get found out for a while; after all, how often does a $24.95 charge attract your notice?

I will be getting a Fraud letter shortly that I will have to fill out and sign and send back to the bank. After that I will get refunded. My card is no longer valid and I will be getting another one and I have charge-blocks turned on for both charge names. I requested that these names be entered into a the national credit fraud database so that anyone else that gets charges from any of these companies with get flagged and have a fraud agent contact them for verification. Who knows if that is going to happen though.

After I got off the phone with the fraud department, I found out some more names they are affiliated with, so I listed them here with the ones above added in too:

aprosupport.com
epoch.com
jetchrg.com
paycom
rknethelp
rknetmedia

Evidently these shadow companies were set up to “discreetly” bill credit cards for online pornography so that if your significant other found your credit card bill, they wouldn’t have any idea what the charge was for.

In other words, make sure you scour your bank statements every month. It is harder to dispute fraud if the charge is over 60 days old.