Credit card blues

Lat week one of my friend suffered a loss of Rs 35000 because of internet banking fraud. Poor boy, his financial stars seems to be in wrong shape. This weekend he went to Chandigarh for a party. On sunday he got a call from the credit cards department of his bank, HSBC. The calling agent asked whether he has commited the last transaction of Rs17000 from his credit card, to purchase kingfisher Airline tickets. Whoops!!!! what is this, he replied a big NO. Last time he used his credit card in NOIDA only, few days ago. The calling agent informed that it seems to be a fraud transaction made by his credit card. The agent assured him that he will file a request to not consider this transaction into his HSBC credit card account. The thanked him put the phone down.

Now the question is, how did the bank figure out that, that particular transaction is made by someone else. One possible reason is that, after few consecutive transactions, the automated checking system send information to the HSBC bank people. Then, the HSBC bank people calls the credit card owner and asks about the validity of the transaction. Now, in this particular case, as the friend did not make the transaction, so being right, he denie about the transaction. What if someone wrongly denies about such transaction. How the bank will verify that the person is denying wrongly.

Actually, there could be some other hidden mechanism by which the bank people come to know that a particular credit card transaction is not valid. HOW, this is still dark to me. Antbody knows???

One more thing, the friend had to call the HSBC customer care to inform them about the full scenario. Let us wait and watch whether he gets the charges or not!!!