Paying Off Credit Card, Scam?

Question

I have someone who wants to pay off my credit card for me and all he asked for was my username and password for my online account to make the payments. I’ve checked my account and I can’t find any important information that he could find from just having those two things but I’m still a bit unsure. Advice?

Answer 1

No. Never share your username/password with anyone. Go look on your bank's Terms of Service, it specifically forbids that. When you signed up for your account, you agreed to never share your password. Keep your word.

All they need to pay off your card is a payment slip. There's one on every statement; so go get a PDF of your credit card statement. Page 1 will have a payment slip meant to be printed out; it's intended for making payments via postal mail. That's all they need. Attach a paper cheque and mail it in. A real friend/family member could make do with that.

They want your username/password for nefarious reasons. If you send a payment slip, they wil give you some sing-song about how that won't work for them - just watch!

--

Honestly, the happiest possiblity here is that the money is quasi-real, but is being laundered: it is either proceeds of unrelated crime, or stolen out of someone's bank account. Once they pay off your credit card, now comes the confidence game: they will ask you to buy things for them e.g. iTunes gift cards, Visa gift cards, etc. You will send along the relevant codez off the cards, they say "thanks" and then, the credit card payoff payment will reverse. The victim will claw it back, or the government will seize it. Boom, you're suddenly late and overlimit. The crooks' logic is they're stealing from your bank, but actually, you are on the hook for it. Your credit rating gets burned, and you get sued.

Answer 2

This is a scam. There are plenty of ways to transfer money to you that you could then use to pay off your credit card that don't involve you giving anyone any passwords.

Once someone has control of your account they could probably

• change the password
• change your address
• order a new card
• run up bills on the new card
• reset the address again