ASTORIA, Queens (WABC) — A Queens charity that helped feed hundreds of thousands during the pandemic is in need of a helping hand after it was victim of a booming scam called a credit card test attack.
This is where scammers test whether your credit card is working by making a fraudulent charge of a buck or two.
After the flood of fraud it was up to 7 On Your Side’s Nina Pineda to recover thousands in stolen donations.
“It wasn’t a hack of our account, this was an attack,” said Queens Together founder Jonathan Forgash.
The middle-of-the-night ambush of Queens Together, a fledgling food centric charity, targeted to test tens of thousands of stolen credit card numbers.
“The first phone call tipped us off to something really horrible was going on,” Forgash said.
Forgash got cursed out by a stranger whose card was charged a dollar to the nonprofit then maxed out elsewhere.
“She was angry, she was upset, she was cursing, who are you, you stole my money, they all thought we stole their credit card and were running it through our system,” Forgash said.
Victims all over the world got charged $1 or 1 euro and more than 17,000 individual transactions were successfully processed on their account.
It’s the first step to see if the credit card works, once it goes through, the criminals then quickly run the stolen card up and buy goods or take out cash advances.
Forgash said he flagged his credit card processor, Stripe, immediately.
“By noon I had shut down, Stripe was still letting all these go…
