Thu, Sep 14, 2006
Fraud Victim Raises Interesting Questions
Have you checked your
credit card statement lately? What if you found charges for five
commercial flights -- even though you never booked them?
That's what happened to Australian businessman Arman Hicks, who
says if it can happen to him, it can happen to anybody. Hicks tells
the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC for this story) that
whoever charged the flights to his card used the tickets before he
got his statement and realized he'd been defrauded.
Hicks told ABC, "They traveled between all sorts of places -
between Albury and Melbourne, and Melbourne and Cairns, and some
Sydney-Melbourne flights as well. They traveled within hours of
purchasing the tickets"
The scary part, according to Hicks, is that the perpetrators got
on board the airliners without have to show any ID. When Hicks
contacted Quantas Airlines to investigate the charges, Quantas
officials gave him the impression this wasn't the first incident of
its kind. They also told him the Australian government doesn't
require passengers to show ID to board a plane.
"As I understand it the only sort of security that they would
have faced would have been the normal x-ray checking at boarding,"
says Hicks. "Apart from that they would have picked up their
boarding passes without having to talk to anybody."
Australian Transport Ministry officials say Australian Security
Intelligence Organisation (sp) officials are more worried about
what someone brings aboard a flight than about their identity.
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