Curve, fraud, and terrible customer support

[BBbetter]

obut wrote:

I’ve had 4 x $20 fraudulent payments for ‘Openai *chatgpt Subscr’ taken this morning.

Same merchant for me. So two random curve users targeted and no other cards impacted.

Looks like someone has got hold of data of many curve customers and is going thru one card at a time.

[obut]

TGLoyalty wrote:

It’s more likely that you both had it attached to a service or website etc that has had its info compromised.

Tbh I’ve stopped saving my cards on pretty much any website.

I guess you’re probably correct, as any wider breach would likely have drummed up more reporting online. Other than Apple Pay, the only place the details are saved is Uber, but again you’d expect wider reporting online if anything untoward had happened there. I guess I’m probably overlooking something and will never know.

To curve’s credit, at least the notifications are quick to come through and the card is easy to freeze. My partner had a second wave of payments blocked this morning luckily by freezing her card yesterday! I’ll take it as a lesson learned in card security and hopefully I’m able to retrieve the funds (although $80 is fairly paltry in comparison to some of the attacks above).

[Tom2]

6 x $15 OpenAI transactions for me as well all within an hour of each other… Seems very strange lots of curve cards with the same fraud?

[rosco]

Exactly the same for my wife and myself.
I got hit with six $20 on Friday and my wife on Saturday.
My card is saved in numerous websites as it is used heavily, but my wifes is hardly used or saved with any.

I would put a pretty safe bet it is a Curve issue.

I froze my card and asked for a replacement. My wife has to pay £59.99 as she lost hers last year.

Fingers crossed Curve get it resolved, but their customer service response is diabolical from my previous issues.

[blue_wolf]

Same here. 7x 20 USD OpenAI/ChatGPT transactions on my partner’s Curve card. Filed a claim via the form, hoping it gets resolved soon.

Why was 3D Secure (OTP) not used for these transactions?

Someone tried it with my Curve card too but apparently they were using my old Curve card details so it was blocked.

[Skywalker]

I used to really like Curve card, but dropped them due to sheer incompetence.

Good luck with this latest issue everyone 😔

[rosco]

My son has now had this on his Curve card too. Another 6 x $20.

Then now that my wife and I have blocked our Curve cards, we both had a charge for $1 for Bethany CHR SVC.

Clearly a massive data breach somewhere and trying every card they can.

[blue_wolf]

Just had a charge for $1 at Bethany CHR SVC on my partner’s card, declined thankfully since we froze the card on Saturday after the OpenAI/ChatGPT transactions!

[Rui N.]

Where do you froze the card these days? Can’t find that anywhere

EDIT: Found it! Account>Manage

[obut]

Just had all 4 charges refunded and a new card posted. Submitted my form around 7:30am Saturday morning. Obviously nice to get the money back but would be good to understand what the issue was as it doesn’t instil much confidence in Curve.

Edit just spotted the Bethany $ charge, as reported above, despite my account being frozen…

[BBbetter]

obut wrote:

Obviously nice to get the money back but would be good to understand what the issue was as it doesn’t instil much confidence in Curve.

Yep. This sounds like Nectar points theft. Instead of fixing the issue, Sainsbury’s pretends like nothings wrong.

[tomtom135]

To be fair I think their CS has improved significantly over the last few months. I nearly canned it last year but decided to keep it and the last few times I’ve contacted support they’ve responded quickly. It used to take literally 2 weeks even though I have the metal card.

[rosco]

Even after listing out every single transaction for my son, my wife and my card, they still have not refunded all of our charges, nearly two weeks on! Some have been done but not all.

They reply to say. they will and then only do half of them and ignore your reply email.

Their service is still shockingly bad.

[Swiss Jim]

Curve are useless. When it works, fine. My card has been blocked for over a month. They’ve not responded to a single email. Even when I raised a formal complaint.

All my recurring charges being declined (clearly not putting any one offs into it). Except their monthly fee of course which has gone through fine.

I would close and move on. Except I’m blocked from doing that. And I’ve no idea how to stop them charging me again without removing all cards except one – then cancelling that one card.

[sturgeon]

I’ve had the same $20 open ai charge appear overnight.

The notification overnight from curve said my old card details were used for an attempted transaction. That’s the same card I experienced the phone fraud attempt earlier this year on although I didn’t think those people had my card details at the time. So much for ‘bank level security’. My physical card has never left a drawer! I don’t believe the transaction could be successful even if they had the correct card details due to 2fa, even though the curve app only needs a 4 digit plus email to enter doesn’t it?

[Skywalker]

@sturgeon, did you order a new card when the phone fraud was attempted initially?

[Swiss Jim]

After 6 (yes, SIX…) weeks and a lot of ignored chasing Curve have just sent me an email saying (paraphrased) ‘sorry for the delay / all ok / block lifted / here’s £10 compensation’.

If I didn’t get so much value from Curve it would have been in the bin a very long time ago.

Just wondering how many weeks until the same thing happens again…

[Candor]

I just joined curve , with the pro plan- with intention to put HMRC fees through it, plus have a number of trips abroad where the FX free would be very useful
However they’ve sent a business card, meaning there was a charge appearing when I was attempting to pay HMRC
Not a great start with them

[EwanG]

Candor wrote:

I just joined curve , with the pro plan- with intention to put HMRC fees through it, plus have a number of trips abroad where the FX free would be very useful
However they’ve sent a business card, meaning there was a charge appearing when I was attempting to pay HMRC
Not a great start with them

I had this when I upgraded to metal (from a personal basic card). Easily changed to a personal card, but the cynic in me considers this is part of their strategy to maximise interchange fees and the user won’t notice!

Write a message to support requesting a refund of fees to see if they oblige. The fees charged by HMRC should have been obvious in front, unlike Curve’s own fees which only appear later!

[Candor]

I spotted it when I was typing in the details on HMRC website and an extra charge was coming up at 2% , so didn’t proceed with the payment
Just waiting on a response from curve support team for a new card

[JDB]

Candor wrote:

I just joined curve , with the pro plan- with intention to put HMRC fees through it, plus have a number of trips abroad where the FX free would be very useful
However they’ve sent a business card, meaning there was a charge appearing when I was attempting to pay HMRC
Not a great start with them

Did you specify whether you wanted a personal or business card you wanted when you applied?

[sturgeon]

Skywalker wrote:

@sturgeon, did you order a new card when the phone fraud was attempted initially?

Yes, well Curve cancelled the old one and sent a new one rather than me asking.

[BBbetter]

Instead of fixing these issues, Curve is sending reminders on how to freeze the card!

[rjn21]

Has anyone charged back a transaction, via the underlying proper credit card?

I have a curve transaction with a very large brand, but no service received, no response from the merchant, no response from chat in the curve app, no response from curve email support, after 6 weeks.

My next step is to reverse the transaction with the underlying proper big bank credit card (not s75 as that is NA given the curve intermediary).

I can see the argument already that the payment was correctly made by big bank to curve, and curve then correctly passed it on to the merchant, so curve have done no wrong (from the underlying credit card perspective).

[JDB]

@rjn21 – you need to pursue the matter with Curve. As you have identified, the transaction was correctly made by the underlying card provider so you have no effective recourse there. In order to be able to make a successful chargeback, your issue with the merchant needs to fall within specific criteria.