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.

FMI: www.asio.gov.au/