On 10 and 11th November someone using my stolen Mastercard number created some listings on ebay.com.au, gumtree.com.au and carsales.com.au. I noticed the transactions on the 12th and contacted the fraud department of my bank. I cancelled the card (inconvenient as I was leaving to go overseas for two weeks) and initiated the chargeback process for the charges (only about $80 in total).

It turns out that at least one of the listings was activated. On Gumtree, a Nissan Patrol was listed as being for sale at my address. I don’t own a Nissan Patrol and it is not for sale. The ad did however look convincing. Interestingly the contact phone number was disconnected which I guess forces interested purchasers to come to our house. Accordingly a few people turned up to look at it which spooked my wife. Today my wife got a text pretending to be from me and listing an email address purportedly mine at gregluck8@live.com.au.

I presume what is happening is an attempted identity theft and that the thief plans to defraud third parties. Accordingly we have reported everything to the Queensland Police at their Milton Station starting on 12th November and will continue to report further episodes in his saga.

Now my purpose for blogging about all of this is to put on notice third parties who might think they are transacting with me. I suggest you try and establish that it is me. If in person ask to see my passport. If electronic it is harder, but a good starting point would be to use my actual email which is gluck AT gregluck.com. And if you are technically inclined I use GPG. My public key is here: gregluck-public-gpg-key.