Consumer complaint received 2023-09-15
Product: Credit card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Problem with a purchase shown on your statement — Credit card company isn't resolving a dispute about a purchase on your statement
Company: DISCOVER BANK (PA)

On XX/XX/2023 I was looking at a pharmacy website for gift cards and saw an ad for gift cards. Clicking on this ad brought up ransomware which locked up my XXXXXXXX  PC. I tried to shut down the PC by pushing the power button several times but I was unable to turn it off. The laptop has a battery deep inside and I could not get it out to shut it down. On the front of the screen was a note that said to call XXXX tech support to help remove the virus. The phone number was XXXX which is the official XXXX tech support number. I called this number and thought it was XXXX, but it was a scammer. Somehow the virus had corrupted my phone and I was speaking to a scammer who claimed to be a XXXX employee and promised to catch the criminals and remove the virus. That was a lie. He proxied into my computer and showed me that someone in XXXX had used my credit card ( I recognized my credit card account number ) to buy {$15000.00} worth of illegal child XXXX. This number was linked to my name and address. Unless i sent the scammers {$15000.00} of gift cards to reverse the XXXX transaction, the police would come to my home, arrest me and put me in jail. He said I had 2 hours to buy the gift cards and give them all the numbers from the back. I knew the penalties for child XXXX so their repeated threats were very upsetting. I tried to call my credit card companies to confirm that this payment would reverse the transaction. When I called the phone numbers on the backs of my 2 credit cards, I got the same story that the criminals told me because the scammers had corrupted my telephone connections! Then the scammers sent me to the XXXX XXXX where I bought two {$2000.00} gift cards and one {$1000.00} gift card. The first attempt failed when i tried to use my XXXX XXXX XXXX credit card. The transaction was declined. Then I tried Discover credit card and those transactions went through. Discover card advertises their {$0.00} Fraud Liability Guarantee which says you are never responsible for " authorized '' transactions. Discover card claims they " protect you from fraudulent charges '' But now they claim that this transaction was " authorized '' by me. So, I looked up the dictionary definition of fraud : " The crime of obtaining money or property by deceiving people '' or " the crime of using dishonest methods to take something valuable from another person '' Thus, I am a victim of financial fraud. Discover card bank should have declined these unusually large, multiple gift card transactions, just as XXXX XXXX  XXXX had done. But they did not. Instead, I got a full page letter dated XX/XX/XXXX from Discover bank explaining how sophisticated scammers have become and that I must pay up. I feel Discover bank is negligent because they have not protected their customers from fraud as they promised to do in their written advertising. As of XX/XX/XXXX, I have not yet been fined for not paying this extortion because Discover has decided to further investigate my dispute, even after sending me the letter of XX/XX/XXXX described above. Discover needs to update their computer system to detect fraud and decline suspicious transactions, similar to how other credit card companies do.