Beware of fraudulent credit card charge 'SEI*Eurosports'

If you perform a google search for SEI*EUROSPORTS you will find that they are a company based out of North Carolina that sells soccer equipment and apparel. The website is www.soccer.com and the phone number is 1-800-934-3876. They market under the brand "Eurosports". Call them directly to find out why the charge.

You'll also find that there have been several reports of fraudulent charges under this name on people's credit cards and that it's flagged as something to watch for. Other banks and credit cards have flagged unauthorized 'purchases' posted to credit cards under this name. I'd be very suspicious.

Yes, I see what both of you mention in search results.
It is definitely a fraudulent charge, and the card has been canceled.
Now i just hope the new card shows up before i leave for my next trip.

What has me scratching my head about this is that a couple weeks back a curious thing showed up on my account -- there was a small charge from hotels.com (that I didn't make) and then a matching refund on the same day.
If there hadn't been a small, 8-cent, difference between the amounts, I might never have noticed the transactions.
But I did, and I guessed that the difference was because the currency probably wasn't in dollars and that was why the numbers didn't match exactly.

When I called the bank about this, they said it was probably just an accident on hotels.com's part and that it didn't need any further investigation beyond just crediting me the 8 cents.
Now I'm wondering if that transaction was actually a way for a thief to easily check and see if the credit card number was a good number / active account before using it for real fraud, as happened today.

The hotels.com charge and refund were, it turns out, done in rupiah rather than USD. Much farther east than I have been in years!

More news -- the physical card involved in this is one of the new metal ones with an embedded chip, so the bank says that they will send me a prepaid envelope with the replacement card to send the old card back to them to be destroyed, rather than the more (until lately) standard practice of destroying a plastic card yourself.

Don't forget - if you used the old card to book train tickets (and maybe other things) and have to pick the tickets up at a machine, you still need the old card to pick them up... (the new one may have a diff expiry date or security code...I'm sure I've seen stories about people booking with an old card and being able to use the new card to get tickets).

I booked some train tickets for next month in the UK and one of the things it said was 'you will need the payment card used...' I saw on the train site that even if the card used to book the tix had expired, you were still supposed to bring the expired card...

My guess is that your card was cloned somewhere without your knowledge, possibly in a skimming device at a reader such as on a gas pump. And this likely happened a few months ago. This has happened to us in the past, and the credit card fraud people let us know immediately when there were trial attempts for negligible purchases at gas stations to see if the card was valid. Looks like they are now finding ways to test the faked cards that don't trigger fraud alerts.

To close out this topic, just today in the mail I got a message from the fraud desk at my credit card company that is dated 12 December in which they give the final results of their investigation -- the charges on my card were not my responsibility and the credit they had provisionally applied when I made the original complaint will stand permanently.
It's interesting that this letter is seen as necessary on their part, since I canceled the card almost immediately and have been using the new one for a couple of months already.
The letter implies that there may have been other charge attempts on the account that the fraud desk found smelly, so the speculation above that the card was cloned at some point without my noticing is probably true.

I had a very strange experience with a credit card charge, too, recently. One day I had a package from Neiman Marcus on my porch. It contained an item that apparently cost about $10, but there was no invoice or indication of who had sent it. I thought perhaps it was sent by a friend as a surprise, but I called NM just to see if they could tell me who ordered it. They looked at the order and said there was an instruction not to include a name (as you might do for an anonymous gift), but that it had been ordered with a credit card ending in xxxx. It sounded familiar, and sure enough - I have a card ending in those numbers. Whoever had my card info (I had the card) had ordered a small item and had it sent to me, but used my card to pay for it. NM told me to keep the item, and credited my card back. The bank felt that it was a "test" transaction, to see if the card info was valid. I also immediately canceled that card and got a new one.

I have received letters from credit card companies stating how the investigation was resolved. I don't think there's any subtext there.