diversdiscount.com lies

[Scubadent]

Despite the many positive posts that I have heard about DiveInn in Spain my experience was not so encouraging.

I ordered the SK-7 Suunto compass from them and got it in a reasonable amount of time. Love the compass. I was however shocked to find out that the same night that I placed the internet order with my internet credit card, 2000 fraudulent purchases were made via internet sites and Western Union over the course of 6 days. I only learned of the theft because a Western Union employee called to verify a wire transfer. Contacting my credit card company, I was told that 2000 purchases have been made using my number!

I realize that this could happen at any site, and it certainly may not be DiveInn's fault, but I am a bit skeptical about purchasing a product this way overseas now. The transactions are not as secure as you may think. This may produce the "well DUHH, Sherlock" statemtents from some, but I have made purchases on the internet previously and felt relatively safe in doing so. No longer.

Each fraudulent charge was between 30 and 100 dollars, so my only question is...what happened to my credit LIMIT??

FWIW, if youre looking into a compass, get the SK-7!

 

[jonnythan]

Scubadent once bubbled...
Despite the many positive posts that I have heard about DiveInn in Spain my experience was not so encouraging.

I ordered the SK-7 Suunto compass from them and got it in a reasonable amount of time. Love the compass. I was however shocked to find out that the same night that I placed the internet order with my internet credit card, 2000 fraudulent purchases were made via internet sites and Western Union over the course of 6 days. I only learned of the theft because a Western Union employee called to verify a wire transfer. Contacting my credit card company, I was told that 2000 purchases have been made using my number!

I realize that this could happen at any site, and it certainly may not be DiveInn's fault, but I am a bit skeptical about purchasing a product this way overseas now. The transactions are not as secure as you may think. This may produce the "well DUHH, Sherlock" statemtents from some, but I have made purchases on the internet previously and felt relatively safe in doing so. No longer.

Each fraudulent charge was between 30 and 100 dollars, so my only question is...what happened to my credit LIMIT??

FWIW, if youre looking into a compass, get the SK-7!

I doubt the credit card was stolen via that online transaction. Online transactions *are* extremely safe. DiveInn has an RSA 1024 bit public key certificate and all credit card data passing over the internet is encrypted at 128 bits. There's a project to break a *64 bit* encryption at distributed.net ...been going on since 1997... and they have the full power of 100,000 desktop computers.

Anyway, credit cards numbers are far more often stolen from sites that don't use encryption (look for that https:// on the page where you type it in), or simply from the drawer of the register at the pharmacy or department store. People worry a lot about the internet, but it's infinitely easier to listen in to someone's cordless phone conversation, or the 17 year old clerk to copy down the numbers and name from the Walgreen's receipt.

Anyway, thankfully the credit card companies deal with fraud quite well, and you're not responsible for the charges! Sorry about your troubles..

BTW, what DID happen to your limit?

 

[chris_b]

Scubadent once bubbled...
...I was however shocked to find out that the same night that I placed the internet order with my internet credit card, 2000 fraudulent purchases were made via internet sites and Western Union over the course of 6 days...

Scubadent, did you contact DiveInn about this? The same thing happened to me, twice! I was pretty sure the first happened at DiveInn because of the timing. After the second one there was no doubt that the card number was stolen via my entering my information at DiveInn. The DiveInn people were very apologetic and told me that they were going to have a security evaluation of their computer systems.

The solution to this is to simply fax them your credit card information. I've done this with no problems at all.

The fraud specialist people with my cc company told me that it often doesn't matter that the transmission of information from the buyer's computer to the store's is encrypted. If the store's computer has been compromised, criminals simply access the cc info. database directly. If you fax your cc info in, it never goes into that database.

Another way to avoid this altogether is to use a cc that allows you to use randomly-generated one-time-use cc numbers. Discover card and MBNA are the two that I am aware of which provide this service.

 

[jonnythan]

chris_b once bubbled...
The fraud specialist people with my cc company told me that it often doesn't matter that the transmission of information from the buyer's computer to the store's is encrypted. If the store's computer has been compromised, criminals simply access the cc info. database directly. If you fax your cc info in, it never goes into that database.

Yeah, that's true... my cc was stolen once when Buy.com's database was comprimised. I've worked at places that take online orders, and sometimes even faxed cc numbers sometimes end up in the database. You can ask any online vendor specifically *not* to store your cc number!

 

[Wordmonger]

I've had good experiences with Divers Discount.