There was a suspicious entry on my credit card bill.
I check all my statements. It has proved to be a useful exercise in the past. Erroneous entries, double entries, and incorrect sums, to name but a few things I’ve spotted over the years.
In this case it was an unrecognised entry for a bar in another county. A bar I’ve never been to, and a county I haven’t visited in many months.
Now a few years ago I would have just picked up the phone and called the credit card company and asked them to explain the transaction. But I’ve become pretty nifty with the old OSINT knowledge. So I put on the deerstalker and started investigating…
First I looked up the company. They had been trading for a decade and their business was listed as bars and restaurants. Plural.
Next I looked at my diary and emails to work out where I was on the date of the entry and several days before, as it can take a couple of days for a payment to be processed. I had visited one reastaurant for a spot of lunch. I checked the restaurants web site but nothing obvious revealed a connection to the bar listed on my statement.
Next I downloaded a PDF of the restaurant’s example lunch menu and worked out what I had ordered including drinks and the estimated bill with taxes etc. We had a match. But still I had to prove it.
I started searching for both the restaurant and the bar’s trading names together, and found one article on Facebook about the bar’s owners venturing further afield and branching out into smaller venues in nearby counties. Eventually I located an article that linked both the bar and restaurant.
I now knew that this was a valid purchase. But how many other people that ate there and paid by card and looked at their statements like I do would think, hang on a minute, what’s this? There was nothing on the menu or in the restaurant that informed me that my bill payment will show up on my statement as X. Nothing. And they were paperless in that they did not do printed receipts.
At least I now know that the transaction wasn’t fraudulent. And I found yet another use for my ever growing OSINT skills.