On 28th January, I received a notification on my phone that a transaction was done on Apple with my Tabby card. While my brain was processing the information, I received a second transaction notification from Apple, and I realized it was fraud and opened the app to freeze my card. As I was freezing, I was hit with a third transaction, this time from TikTok. These transactions happened within a 25-second window. Even after my freeze, I got notifications for attempted purchases, but since the card was frozen, they did not go through. No OTP was received for any transaction.I immediately raised it to Tabby, the issuer, and for 12 days they did not even acknowledge there was a problem. I called every day and sent emails, but all they did was blame me. They always would say, "Maybe it was your friends?", "Did you give your card details to family?", "Did you subscribe to anything?" Even though this is an obvious fraud case, attempting to do 5 transactions in a minute.Finally, after 12 days, they decided to initiate the official dispute process. Meanwhile I reached out to merchants, TikTok and Apple. Apple confirmed that the transactions were done by an Apple ID that is not me, and they themselves refunded the transactions in a few weeks. However, TikTok did not engage with me in a meaningful way and asked me to raise it with the issuer. Tabby said it will take up to 90 days.
This week they got back to me, which is roughly 90 days after the transaction date. They told me that the acquirer bank rejected the claim. What is their evidence? Well... their evidence is a copy of their terms of services... and make it two times...
I am attaching their response, which proves the fraud because they mention the device, which is not my device, they mention the email, which is not mine, they mention the name and username, which are also not mine. I do not even have a TikTok account, and I never had. The report even shows that the payment method was added on January 28th, which is surprisingly the date of the transaction, another supporting evidence for me.
I raised it to Tabby and they told me they "can't do anything after the acquirer rejection. Go file a police report," which is not correct, because I have worked in a consumer bank myself in a role that happens to work with fraud department, and I know that the issuer can decline the pre-arbitration response from the acquirer and raise it to the network, Visa or Mastercard, and let them be the arbiter. Sharing my experience so that people would be more careful while using Tabby because if a fraud happens, this is the situation you are likely to face.