Possible Banking Scam

[Quillan]

I have had some money taken out of my (French) bank and then returned. The transaction details are "PTI Europe Regi Frais". I was wondering what it was as I don't remember anything about a company called PTI.

I decided to type it in to Google and was very surprised to see I am not the only one and it's been happening in the UK as well as France and for all I know other countries as well. I got the impression that they take the money for between 5 to 10 days (in my case 6) and return it. I wonder if this is a scam as some of the things  I read on different forums (like Moneysavingexpert) seem to imply that they put the money on overnight deposit for a few days, get the interest and then return it. In my case it was just over 60 Euros but some have only been a few pounds in the UK. I am mindful of the old story of the guy who was supposed to have stripped of the odd pennies from peoples accounts but when it added up it was millions. I wonder if this is what is happening, all those little pennies of interest could add up to a lot of money?

I trust you all go through your bank accounts line by line [;-)] .

[Cat]

Checking various sites, it looks like PTI Europe may be a payment gateway reference, and that several companies (Amazon, Yahoo, Google, AOL, Napster, Weight Watchers etc) use this as an internal reference when processing their payments.  The reference somehow managed to find it's way onto thousands of bank statements when the payments for these companies were taken.  Possibly.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=22540124

[Chas]

In my case it was associated with a payment to "Vitamins Direct". Perhaps I should have been more concerned than I was but as it carried the same bank payment reference as the order I took no action.

[Quillan]

Yes Cat but then as many of the people have said in several forums they have not bought anything through any of the companies mentioned, or indeed on the Internet. In my case why have they taken it, given it back and there is no other transaction for that amount? What some people have said is that they believe their information has been harvested some time in the past because they have used Napster, Amazon, AOL etc but not for some considerable time.

If they have your CC or debit card number they therefore have your billing address and surely, if it was all legitimate, you would receive a written invoice, transaction report by either post or email. If it was done in error then you would expect some form of communication both appologising and explaining whats gone on. I rather think it's something dodgy and also very cleaver. I mean nobody is going to complain too much since they got their money back without probably never realizing it had gone missing in the first place.